Okay, this indeed should not be done here, and I agree that there are other points of view on this matter than just mine - but I just can't stop here right now. After all, I guess it is better to argue about this than about the terrorist actions Bush has been committing lately.
Originally posted by markgugs
Stalin/Russia merely "stalled" the Germans and kept them tied up so the other Allied forces could break through in France, Belgium, Holland, Italy and finally into Germany.
Most incorrect. At the time of the Normandy invasion, the Soviets had already won the war in the east and routed the German army - had the Germans thrown all their forces from the west to the east, it wouldn't have stopped the Soviets for any longer than a couple of months. I present some statistics I found from the net below to support this
fact.
Where you are right, is that the supply the Americans gave to the Soviets (and some less significant Allies) probably had an effect on the outcome of the war - a much bigger effect than any American military operation in the war had. Still, however, the end result wouldn't probably been different without it - again, it would probably just have taken a little longer for the Soviets to crush the Germans.
And again, about the war in the Pacific, that was just a regional conflict that started in 1937 and just happened to occur at the same time as the Second World War (well, that's for sure an opinion, but one shared quite largely outside those couple of nations that participated on that Pacific war).
And then about the statistics - here are the German losses (note, this does not include the Romanian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Finnish and Italian losses on the east front, which were massive) on both fronts up to 30th of November, 1944 (dunno why there aren't any numbers after that, the site is probably still under construction) taken from
www.feldgrau.com/stats.html .
KIA = killed in action
MIA = missing in action
WIA = wounded in action
The west front after the French campaign and before Normandy:
KIA - 20 000 +
MIA - 1 700 +
WIA - ? (no information)
Africa campaign:
KIA - 12 808
MIA - 90 052
WIA - ?
Italian campaign:
KIA - 47 873
MIA - 97 154
WIA - 163 600
The west front from D-Day til 11.30.44:
KIA - 66 266
MIA - 338 933
WIA - 399 860
This limited info gives us a total of
KIA - 146 947
MIA - 527 839
WIA - 563 460
confirmed German losses on theaters that included Americans. Now, if we account 50% of them for the Yanks (which is probably an exaggeration, considering that the British, French, etc. were doing most of the work anyway), we get a total of 619 123 Germans removed from fighting by Americans.
Now, the eastern front from 1941 til 11.30.44:
KIA - 1 419 728
MIA - 997 056
WIA - 3 498 060
That is a total of 5 914 844 Germans removed from fighting by the Soviets - nearly ten times more than we attributed for the Americans!
And this was
NOT counting the hundreds of thousands of Romanian, Hungarian, etc. soldiers that died in the hands of the Soviets.
Also note that all the best German units with the best equipment were fighting (and killed) on the eastern front - the units the western allies faced before the battle of Ardennes were inexperienced and poorly equipped second-line units.
The battle of the Ardennes was different, though - the remainders of the best German units were taken from the east to the west in one of Hitler's mad operations. The war itself, however, had already been decided in the east by that time - the Soviet march towards Berlin could not have been stopped with any forces the Germans had.
(And to add to it, the Soviets killed thousands of Japanese soldiers as well.)
-Villain
