Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Did the Soviet Union win WW2 alone?" video.

The flaw is thinking that credit for the victories goes to Germany alone. Just because lots of people fall for that fallacy, doesn't make it true. Rommel couldn't have won a single battle in North Africa without the Italian troops and equipment under his command, and he couldn't have even gotten to Africa to begin with without the Italian Navy giving him a lift.
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The limiting factor for Japan's war effort in the Pacific was shipping, not manpower - they didn't have the extra shipping to get those troops to the South Pacific or to supply them once there, so tying down those troops had pretty much zero impact on the war against the Americans. Not to take anything away from the Chinese defending their homeland, but if they'd simply stopped fighting and retreated deep into the interior in 1942 it would have had little impact on the outcome of the war (although it might have been another story had an invasion of the Japanese home islands been necessary). Likewise the Burma campaign, including the American contributions (which included one of my uncles) had little effect on the outcome of the war for the same reason - few if any of the Japanese forces involved could have been redeployed to the South Pacific if they hadn't been needed in Burma. Of course, this is with the benefit of hindsight and during the war the Allied leaders believed that keeping China in the war and keeping the Japanese out of India were absolutely vital objectives. They did not foresee how utterly devastated Japan's naval and air forces would be in the fighting in the Pacific or how thoroughly its economy would be demolished by shipping losses and air raids, leaving the Japanese homeland completely indefensible against American sea and air power. The Soviets undoubtedly had some effect on the timing of the surrender but it was a completely foregone conclusion by the time they entered the war. Of course the timing of the surrender was far from trivial since it prevented millions of people on both sides dying in an invasion, so we may have the Soviets to thank in part for that not being necessary. OTOH the contributions of the Australians and New Zealanders in the South Pacific were absolutely vital in the dark days of 1942 and no one who knows anything about the war would ignore them.
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Hopefully Stalin was allowed to watch from his cell in the infernal regions as a pope with no divisions played an essential role in setting the eventual collapse of Stalin's empire in motion.
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No certain figure for Chinese deaths will probably ever be known because China went from near anarchy to war with Japan to civil war to decades of Communist misrule, so records are very spotty at best and its nearly impossible to determine exactly when and how the people died.
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They absolutely would have lost. The effect of the Western Allies' blockade cannot be underestimated. Without it Germany could have bought all the oil and other resources it needed from overseas. Even if the US and UK refused to sell to them, imagine all the oil from Venezuela and/or the Netherlands East Indies flowing into the Third Reich, plus the rubber, tungsten, and other strategic materials - with those resources logistics on the Eastern Front would have reached a whole new level which means Germany would probably have knocked the USSR out in 1941 and definitely would have in 1942. That's not even considering all the German men and equipment lost in the west in 1940 or the effect of being able to concentrate 100% of their forces, particularly their air force, in the east in 1941-42. Why do you think Hitler wanted to make peace with the UK so badly in 1940? He knew that even without a significant land front in the west the drain on his resources from the blockade and the air war were likely to be decisive, even crippling.
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@davidcolley7714 Marginally? You, sir, are extraordinarily ignorant. What was the single most vital natural resource for every warring power in WW2 but especially Germany and Japan? How much of that resource was available to Germany in Europe? And how much of it was available on the world market from neutral countries but not available to Germany because of the blockade? With all the oil it could buy from places like Venezuela or the Netherlands East Indies Germany would have been unstoppable. The panzers would have rolled all the way to the Urals in 1941.
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@davidcolley7714 Ah. yes. A complete idiot. Thank you for playing.
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If the US had stayed out of it and the war had gone on another year or maybe two or three more years, how many additional millions of civilians might have died? Do you think saving those lives was a wasted effort? Also, you're forgetting that Hitler declared war on the US, taking the matter out of the American government's hands. Sure, we could have sat back and let others do the fighting, but we were at war whether we wanted to be or not.
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@nevermindmeijustinjectedaw9988 America was only 5 months later to the party than the USSR was.
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Manpower losses yes, material losses no. Most of the Luftwaffe was slaughtered by the US and UK.
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@nikosk3080 100% bullshit.
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I'm confused by this comment. Yes, the British and Commonwealth contribution to D-day was massive and vital, but weren't most of the landing craft LCVPs ("Higgins boats") that were manufactured in the US, even if they were under British control?
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You may not have noticed, but the Anglo forces won the Battle of the Bulge. In fact, it was a catastrophic defeat for Germany.
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It would have been a completely different war without the British blockade. And the tide may have turned at Stalingrad, but the war was far from over.
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@XavierY828 I guess even the darkest cloud has a silver lining.
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Race is more than genetic variation between people or even populations. The reason race doesn't exist is twofold - one, while traits do vary between local populations, but the way they are geographically distributed varies between different traits - there's no single border where everyone on one side has one set of traits and everyone on the other has a completely different traits, each trait has its own border. For example, take a look at the distribution of sickle cell trait - you'll often see it described as being common among Africans, but that isn't strictly true: there are parts of Africa where it is very common and other parts where it is as rare as it is among Europeans, and there are also parts of the Middle East and Asia where it is very common and other parts where it isn't. Its distribution does not match the distribution of, say, the genes for dark skin or kinky hair. Or look at the cephalic index, which represents head shape - there's not one head shape unique to Europe, another to Asia, and another to Africa, there are populations on all three continents with longer heads, and populations on all three continents with broader heads. Here's a map showing that distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalic_index#/media/File:PSM_V50_D602_World_cephalic_index_map.jpg Compare the similar index for Turkey, Poland, Burma, and Central America to the extremely different index for the UK, Arabia, India, and Japan. Doe those patterns match any race models you know of? And two, humans have been far too mobile for there to be exclusive lines of descent. Almost everyone has mixed ancestry - like most male Europeans my own R1a Y-DNA haplogroup originated in southwestern Asia, while my mDNA comes from early western European hunter-gatherers. 5,000 years ago those ancestors lived ~ 2,500 miles apart. R1a is also found from India to the Bering Strait, those guys really got around. And there's also been large-scale migration between Africa, the Middle East, and southern Europe for thousands of years, including large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans traded as slaves and even used as soldiers by Arabs for centuries before the tansAtlantic slave trade began. Madagascar was colonized by Malays and Mongols reached as far west as Hungary - where they found Magyars who were originally from western Siberia. Outside of a few very isolated places like the Amazon rain forest or the Andaman islands, the idea of "racially pure" populations anywhere is nonsense.
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@davedoe6445 No, I am not, and you are misconstruing what race means. Tall and short are not races in literally any sense of the word, they are categories of otherwise unrelated people who share ONE single trait. And you completely missed my point. The point isn't that there are fuzzy boundaries, it's that the boundaries are completely different for different traits. Yes, there are short people and tall people. There are fat and skinny people. There are intelligent and stupid people. There are blondes and brunettes. But if someone suggested that tall people are also intelligent, skinny, and blonde and short people are stupid, fat, and dark-haired, you'd laugh at their stupidity, because these traits are not linked in any way, there are many different combinations and someone's height tells you absolutely nothing about their intelligence or the color of their hair. This is why race is a myth, except the differences we're talking about are between small(ish) groups of people rather than individuals. Of course there are groups of dark-skinned people and groups of light-skinned people. There are groups who tend to be tall and groups who tend to be short. There are groups where hair is almost always straight and groups where hair is almost always very curly. There are groups who tend to be long-headed and groups who tend to be broad-headed. And none of these traits are related or necessarily found together, or with any other trait. Dark-skinned populations can be (on average) tall or short, they can be long- or broad-headed, they can have straight or curly hair. If you map the world into regions based on any one of those traits, say, dark skin, and then map the world into regions based on another, say, skull shape, the maps don't look anything at all like each other. The boundaries of whatever races you propose are completely different depending on which traits you choose as your criteria. There is no possible racial breakdown you can create that coincides with all the maps for all traits, because they don't coincide with each other. What you end up with isn't three races or six races or ten races, it's 3,000 races - at which point you're no longer talking about races, you're talking about local populations. Races are by definition broad categories - black people and white people, Europeans and Africans, Slavs and Aryans - who share not just one trait but a whole list of traits, traits which are generally exclusive to that group. A system that includes 500 or 3,000 races, each with its own arbitrary list of shared traits, where there is no individual trait that isn't shared with many other groups (just not in the same combination with other traits), isn't race. Your second point is, again, not about race, it's about individual populations. Inuit, Sherpas, Andes Mountainers, these are not races, they are small populations. Yes, Sherpas and Andes Mountainers are very good at surviving at high altitude. So which race is the race that is good at high altitude, Asians or Native Americans? The answer is neither. Yanomamo aren't any better at surviving high altitude than Irish people are, nor are Khmer. These are not traits shared across a broad group of people occupying a whole continent or even a whole country, they are traits developed locally by small groups living in specific conditions. And the map of people good at surviving at high altitude does not even remotely match the map of people with dark or light skin, or the map of people with long or broad heads. Whatever list of traits you use to define your race, there will be some people good at high altitudes in it and some outside it, and there will be some people who do poorly at high altitudes in it and some outside it. It is not a racial trait, it is a local trait. Likewise, dog breeds aren't race, they are something entirely different, something that can only come to exist through deliberate selective breeding. No dog breed is a natural adaptation to environmental conditions. And no dog breed would survive for even one generation if purebred dogs were allowed to mate with whatever other dogs they happened to encounter. (Thus the strict laws against miscegenation in highly segregated societies - they know race would soon cease to exist if the races were allowed to mix. The problem for them is that no such laws have existed for most of history in the vast majority of human societies. I was actually very surprised when my ancestry test came back 100% northwest European, because that's fairly uncommon for anyone whose family has been in Virginia as long as mine has, because European women were pretty scarce here in 1631.) This is also what people mean by saying that the variations within each race are greater than the variation between purported races. Which race is taller, Europeans or Africans? The answer is neither. Africans includes both Pygmies, who are very short, and Masai, who tend to be very tall. If you measure the difference between the average Pygmy and the average Masai, that difference is much greater than the difference between the dead average African (with or without including North Africa) and the dead average European. So there is no tall or short African race, there are populations of people in Africa who tend to be very tall, and other populations within Africa who tend to be very short. You have to get to a very local area - usually only one of many groups within any given country - before you can find groups that are distinct in that way.
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Your beloved USMC would have spent the war cooling its heels on a dock in San Diego if my beloved US Navy hadn't beaten Japan on the sea and in the air so they could get the Marines (and soldiers) to all those islands they fought on. 😉 (Likewise the Australians won the first land battle against Japan in New Guinea but IIRC they were flown there on USAAF transport planes.)
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I agree that the labor theory of value is nonsense - you can spend hundreds of hours of labor polishing a turd and it isn't going to get any more valuable - but to be fair, if you're comparing the labor of the guy with the shovel to that of the digging machine operator, you also have to include all the labor that goes into making and supporting the digging machine (or to be precise, the percentage of the labor needed to make the machine, including the labor to acquire the resources to make it, that is equivalent to the percentage of the useful lifetime of the machine that is used up in digging the hole, plus the labor needed to fuel and maintain the machine for the time spent digging that hole).
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Your analysis of 1941 and 1942 fails to consider the effect of the British blockade on Germany. Yes, Germany was campaigning to gain resources - resources they needed to capture in Europe because the blockade shut them off from the rest of the world. If they could have bought all the oil, rubber, etc. they needed on the world market it would have been a completely different war, and it's difficult to imagine how the USSR could have won.
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"Miss the story of the American plants that produced the motors for the german panzers." How can you miss something that doesn't exist? That is utter and complete bullshit.
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@richardjansen3317 Do you have a source for that? Ford and GM had thriving businesses in Germany (and many other countries) before the war, but the plants there were entirely under German control once the US entered the war.
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