Who was it that was the deciding factor in WWII. I wasn’t alive then but the history books used to credit the USA with saving Europe’s bacon in WWII. Maybe I remember wrong, maybe it was Andorra. Maybe Mexico was the nation that stormed Omaha Beach. I do remember Reagan with help from Maggie Thatcher and JPII shut down the Soviet economy, or maybe it was the Argentine economy.
The major totalitarian power fought against each other. Germany and the Soviet Union did most of the fighting and killing.
The U.S. and the rest of the allies had a major role, we supplied much of the material that made the Soviet victory over the Germans possible; we defeated the Japanese and the Italians.
It was American air-power that destroyed the German war machine at home.
“Who was it that was the deciding factor in WWII....”
Sir Winston Churchill is credited with saying, “You can count on the Americans to do the right thing - after they’ve tried everything else first.”
American intervention was a deciding factor in the First World War; the US land forces were the only ones that did not implode during that conflict.
I fault the Americans of the 1914-1918 period for daring to believe they could play both ends against the middle, indefinitely. And for determined blindness, in refusing to recognize where the preponderance of US interests resided, until almost too late.
I wasn’t thinking of US industrial power supplying the Allies during the 1939-1945 period, contributing a great deal to final victory.
I was thinking of the mulish inward-looking isolationism and pacificsm of the period 1931-41. Some of it afflicted the Allies too.
With Adolf Hitler and his coterie of thugs in charge, a resurgent Germany bluffed the Western Allies over and over, watching carefully to see if France and Britain were going to stand up to him, or back down.
They backed down, every time until the German attack on Poland.
What-ifs and might-have-beens are problematic in the study of history, but it’s a fair bet that if the United States had thrown its weight behind France and Britain when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, the situation could have been defuzed short of the widespread war that ultimately happened.
But the United States was too enamored of navel-gazing.