Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Churchill was an idiot" video.

  1.  @gratefulguy4130  And you'd be equally wrong to do so. Like Churchill and MacArthur, Eisenhower certainly had significant shortcomings but they are far outweighed by his crucial contribution to victory. The Anglo-American-Soviet alliance was arguably the most successful coalition war in history and Eisenhower's political skills were vital for keeping the western half of that alliance cooperating and focused on the ultimate goal. MacArthur may have been the most insufferable egomaniac in all of American history but after his mistakes in the 1941-42 Philippines campaign (which would have been a Japanese victory no matter who was in charge on the Allied side or what they had done) he was one of the few leaders in the whole theater who fully understood modern warfare and the coordination of land, sea, and air forces on a strategic scale. Nimitz was arguably the most competent commander in the entire Asia-Pacific war, but he was a naval commander and could never have conducted a successful land campaign on the scale of the 2nd Philippines campaign or the invasion of Japan itself had that proved necessary. The successes on land in his AO were entirely due to the complete isolation of relatively small garrisons by sea and air forces, and battles like Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa show how unimaginative he and his subordinates were when it came to land warfare and how costly and futile a protracted land campaign under their command might have been. MacArthur was wrong from a strictly military POV to insist on an invasion of the Philippines, but it's hard to argue that his conduct of the campaign was anything but extremely competent. MacArthur's postwar overseeing of the occupation of Japan was also nothing short of brilliant, and he deserves much of the credit for Japan's rapid transition from a militarist and violent aggressor to a peaceful member of the community of free nations.
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  2.  @thinkingagain5966  Peace on the terms of Hitler controlling the entire continent was not in Britain's short or long-term interest. And Hitler had amply demonstrated that there was no peace or promise whatsoever that he could be trusted to keep. Even Stalin, much as I hate to say it, was a more rational actor on the international stage than Hitler. Hitler wasn't a madman, he was something far worse: a rational and extremely capable man with a thoroughly irrational and anti-humanist world-view.
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  3. I would add that the land campaign wouldn't have been necessary if the local naval commander hadn't lost his nerve in the battle to force the straits with naval power alone. In purely military terms, the loss of a few obsolete and largely useless pre-dreadnought battleships was insignificant next to the chance to force the Ottoman empire out of the war and open the Black Sea to Allied shipping.
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  4. FDR was not the least bit eager for war. He was resigned to its necessity given the hyper-aggressiveness and rapaciousness of the Nazis and the fanatical militarists ruling Japan. That is not the same thing at all. The world owes him, and Churchill, an incalculable debt of gratitude for preparing their respective countries for the inevitable war while their more foolish contemporaries still clung to hopes that Hitler and Tojo (and the rest of his cabal) were reasonable men who could be dissuaded from war with reasonable concessions.
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  5.  @philipcone357  You don't think Stalin's insistence on turning the territory his soldiers had conquered into the Russian Empire 2.0 had anything to do with it? He was already liquidating anyone who might have opposed his puppet governments as early as 1944 (see: Warsaw Uprising), nearly a year before Roosevelt died. Churchill's contribution was recognizing that Cold War was inevitable given the nature of Stalin's rule, just as he (alone) realized even before Munich that Hitler's nature made WW2 inevitable as long as he remained in power.
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  6.  @jimmydesouza4375  The British Empire and its economy were doomed regardless, as was European colonialism in general. 80% of the Eurasian-African landmass was not going to let the other 20% rule and ruthlessly exploit it forever. The imperial powers would have to either let their empires go or move to a more mutually beneficial arrangement like the Roman Empire, but their arrogance and racism would never let them contemplate the latter unless it was forced on them.
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  7. That plan was for the most part not entrusted to radio communications, though. There were updates on things like diplomatic moves and expected local weather sent by radio to Kidō Butai once it was underway, and of course the famous and completely ambiguous go code "Climb Mt. Niitaka," but the preparation and planning for the mission was generally restricted to more secure methods, which was possible because all of the units involved in the attack remained in home waters until the attack force sailed. AFAIK there's no record that any mention of the task force's objective was ever transmitted by radio, let alone that such a transmission was even detected, let alone decoded, by anyone in the US or UK. And the Japanese were so determined to maintain comms security on the mission that they left the radio operators from the task force's ships in Japan to fake normal radio traffic as if those ships were still in port (which fooled everyone in the USN, including Joe Rochefort, into thinking they were) and physically disabled every last transmitter in the fleet, including those on the planes, until the attack was ready to be launched. I think people today have been given an unrealistic view by Hollywood of how signals intelligence actually worked in WW2. Even with the Midway operation six months later, for which detailed plans had to be transmitted by radio to units scattered across millions of square mile by ocean, the Allied picture of Japanese intentions was extremely unclear and argued about vehemently by various commands. "Code breaking" in this context usually didn't mean reading the other side's messages word for word, it meant trying to assemble a picture from thousand of isolated message fragments and data points out of tens of thousands more that couldn't be decoded. And I find the idea that anyone among the Allies was reading JN-25 word for word at any time in 1941 not just implausible but ludicrous, given the absolute clown show of British response to much more widely expected Japanese moves against their own empire. In fact, Allied estimates of Japanese intentions were harmed in this regard by how much they did pick up on Japanese intentions in Southeast Asia, coupled with the erroneous assumption that Japan had neither the resources nor the inclination to conduct more than one major operation at a time. This assumption was shared by the British as well as American analysts and leaders.
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  8. The bad guy won at Bosworth. Also Hastings. No idea what the world would look like today if that hadn't happened, though.
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  9. Sure, Churchill had plenty of flaws. But he was the only man west of the Rhine in 1938 who really understood who and what Hitler was (as you still do not), and if not for his conniving, badgering, and outright bludgeoning the Conservative government to prepare for the war, and without his steadfast insistence on holding out in 1940, half of Europe might have suffered under the Nazi yoke for at least a generation, with who knows how many millions more Poles, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, and others deemed "untermenschen" by the Nazis dead.
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  10. @Magnus "Given" to Stalin? I wasn't ware that Churchill and Roosevelt had any part of eastern Europe to give. And I'm pretty sure neither of them would have remained in power very long had they tried to sell war-weary populaces on a proposal to start a new world war with the USSR as soon as the current one with Nazi Germany was wrapped up.
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  11.  @archivesoffantasy5560  The Romans eventually allowed provincials to become citizens and take part in the government. Many of the later emperors came from the provinces. By the 3rd century there was no meaningful distinction between Romans who were native to Italy and Romans from the provinces who were ethnically Gallic, Greek, or Middle Eastern. The only European colonial empire that did anything like that was France, and that was only for Algeria, and even there native Algerians had a lot fewer opportunities than Roman provincials did. If Britain had granted home rule to India and Ireland (along with Catholic emancipation) and allowed people like Gandhi and de Valera to sit in Parliament, those countries might have remained in the Empire, or at most become self-governing dominions like Canada and Australia. But the British refused to allow non-whites and Catholics any role in government (their own or the Empire's), guaranteeing that those peoples would demand independence. Also, the European empires enacted economic policies that devastated industry in the colonies to prop up their own industries. And that's not even going into atrocities like the Belgians committed in the Congo.
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