Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Historical Events that are Taught Completely Differently in other Countries" video.

The Soviet's contributions to WWII has been vastly understated by the US. It's doubtful that the US would have won either theater without their massive sacrifices.
6
@MrBrock314 Ah, that's interesting. One of the issues that comes up with those sorts of things is that it's not always obvious at what point you can say that something has been invented. Often it comes down to the person that comes up with a practical solution rather than the first one to do whatever it is.
3
@Razmoudah Math is short for mathematics. The Brits just do this weird thing where the remove the ematic from the middle. Resulting in a really awkward to pronounce word.
3
It gets fairly complicated. I do think that the second nuclear bomb probably wouldn't have happened if there had been better communication, because the surrender would have taken longer had it been the cause. Also, the US had already leveled Tokyo. I do think that the Soviets probably did have more of an impact on the Imperial Japanese surrendering when they did than the US educational system was teaching when I was in highschool though because even with the nukes, the war could have gone on for quite some time just due to how spread out the Japanese Empire was and that there was such a limited supply of nukes.
3
Defining wins and losses in wars can be rather complicated if the result is anything either than either an unconditional withdrawal or complete capitulation. The US' Vietnam conflict could be interpreted as a success as the US was there as a result of the domino theory that if they lost Vietnam, that other countries would follow. And that really didn't happen. OTOH, the US lost a lot of service personnel and didn't get to keep any of the land, hence why it's more typically considered to be a loss.
3
They wouldn't have needed to. At that point, the US was capable of striking the main Japanese islands and they were running low on resources to the point of being willing to sacrifice their own pilots to keep things going a bit longer. Even if the Soviets couldn't invade the islands, just keeping the Japanese off the mainland would have forced them to eventually surrender. Realistically, it was probably a bit of both.
2
Deciding which side won a war isn't always easy. It all depends on the objectives in modern wars as one side is usually not destroyed or the other forced out completely. It's more common for one side to suffer heavy losses, but still retain the land, which is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of who really won.
2
I realize you're joking about the coffee, but it wasn't until roughly a century and a half later that coffee really took off in the US.
1
It's just because the Brits don't know how to abbreviate words.
1
I had an Australian boss that insisted that the British voluntarily surrendered their empire.
1
Which isn't correct, the US won and the impressing of US Sailors stopped. It's not needless, the Brits weren't stopping the practice of impressing US sailors without a war. This was long before the UN and any sort of international body existed to potentially tell them to knock it off or else.
1
 @ewandewar3667 Um, what? The aggressors were the British. The Canadian land became a target after the US decided that a war was necessary to prevent further kidnapping of American sailors.
1
@ They're not, they're Canadians. There is no such place as America other than the US, unless you're referring to the supercontinent, which hardly anybody ever does other than when they need to trot out that silliness about how there are all these other Americans out there. It's a dumb and somewhat racist thing to say.
1
@ It's pretty unusual to be speaking in a context where grouping all of the people of the Americas into a single term makes sense. It's bad enough lumping all the people who live in nations where Spanish is the national language into a group, including also the English and French speakers as well, pretty much completely breaks it.
1
@ I think YT screwed up the reply, I don't see any indication that I was responding to you about that. I was specifically responding to a post where they were saying that Canadians are Americans. Or, I misclicked.
1
It was taught that way in the US for quite a while in large part due to the timing. But, in recent years, there's been more debate over the actual cause of them surrendering at that time. But, the Russians, running low on resources and the US having the ability to level their cities were probably all significant contributions to the decision.
1
The issue tends to be time. There's a lot of history that has to be left out in order to have students graduate when they do. You go to college and learn a bunch of stuff like that the HS version is often lacking to the point of bordering on fraud.
1
@ That's what I was taught back in the '80s. It ended the practice of the British capturing sailors and impressing them into service under the crown and it was the last time the US fought with the British. To refer to it as anything other than a loss is a bit of a odd direction to take as there were no further hostilities between the countries after that that I've ever heard of.
1
@ People who are teaching it as something other than victory are wrong. The Brits stopped impressing US sailors into their navy and from what I can tell, there were no further fights between the US and British forces. Eventually, we were on the same side with WWI. To not refer to it as a victory for the US, when the US got to keep independence without any sort of significant loss of land and was now free and clear of the empire completely is a bit of a stretch.
1
@ It wasn't a stalemate, this is what victory looks like when you're on the defensive end of the conflict.
1
@ That's mostly due to time, although sometimes it's on the basis of bias. There's really no good reason to let generations of students believe that Executive Order 9066 targeted Japanese Americans specifically when nowhere in the order does it specify Japanese or any other synonym for it. The Japanese-Americans were the largest group in the concentration camps, but German-Americans and Italian-Americans were also intentionally included and there were other groups like Chinese-Americans that were also mistakenly included even though the Chinese were effectively on the US' side of WWII as they were against the Imperial Japanese and shouldn't have been subject to the relocation order.
1
@ Yep, I think the whole notion that things can't be both a stalemate and a win for one party are kind of misleading. It's kind of happening right now with Ukraine where they've managed to keep the Russians largely bogged down for years now. Sure, Russia has managed to secure significant amounts of land and kill significant numbers of people, when this is over, there may well be a credible view that Ukraine won as Russia doesn't appear to be any closer to fulfilling their aims and has run through a massive number of young men. .
1
That's from the US side. I doubt that the Brits were spreading news of it to the other colonies.
1
The second bomb was probably unnecessary and probably wouldn't have been dropped if lines of communication were better. They wouldn't have been able to surrender so quickly after it was dropped had they not already been planning to surrender. The thing that likely did it was that the Chinese were pissed, the Russians were pissed and the US was capable of absolutely destroying their cities with whatever warning the US cared to give. As in, they were running out of resources and were pinned down too tight to turn things around. Especially with both the Italians and Germans out of the war.
1