Why do people say that the British didn't do a thing in WW2?

[letsnoobtehpwns]

I'm a 16 year old American and even I know that the British kicked ass in WWII. Your teacher is an idiot.

 

[sheogoraththemad]

do they?

 

[Hearthing]

To be fair, the British only had to deal with the Luftwaffe- had the Third Reich actually invaded Britain like they had the rest of mainland Europe, I think you guys would have been in some serious trouble. You probably also wouldn't have done too well if the Americans hadn't been sending you weapons, ammo and equipment secretly.

Well - problem with that is that Unternehmen Seelöwe (Operation Sea Lion) could only go ahead if the third reich had Air Supperiority. When their Luftwaffe was thoroughly defeated by the British ability to pump out thousands of wooden planes and pilots to fly them, Unternehmen Seelöwe was completely flawed.

True enough about the American sending ammo and weapons, though.

OT: Allies vs Axis is often what WWII is summed up as to include everyone. Some people say France did nothing in the war but if it wasn't for the French resistance a lot of what happened wouldn't have been possible.

 

[magic conch]

in that case, your teacher is a fucking idiot.

 

[Yeager942]

But I gotta say that Stalin's execution of 3/4th of his officer corp before the war was just hilarious.

Considering the state of the Soviet forces at the time it wouldn't have made a difference if he did or not. "Feed untrained, barely armed (if at all) conscripts into the woodchipper until it clogs up" doesn't exactly take a military genius to come up with. Even Zhukov had to stick with that general plan until the USSR amassed enough materiel to make a difference.

I'm not saying they didn't make a difference, I'm just commenting on Stalin's careless usage of life.

 

[Dr Snakeman]

Aye the British were a big part of the war. The biggest being the Russians. Poor bastards... Poor everyone in that fucking horrible war. But yeah, your history teacher is a little mahaimhaosmhd. Brits were bad motherfuckers, challenging the Germans in Africa, in the air, in sea. Shit sometimes I wonder what would've happened if Great Britain fell. Hm...

Simple question in fact I was in history today learning about WW2 and my teacher said that the british didn't do a thing and that the americans oh the bloody americans held up everything defending the land.
For when I read the book then it was mostly in Russia and the russians did most of the killing and the biggest sacrifices.
So guys I'm thinking what did the british do?

P.s.I'm a british patriot (16) who lives in Iceland so the education here for history isn't exactly great.

Did your teacher learn about WWII watching war films made by Hollywood?

American was pretty happy not to do anything until near the end, even then the Russains did more for the Allies than anyone, I think half the losses (troops, either MIA or KIA) in WWII were Russain!

Holy shit. Props to you my man. I went to a British school and they didnt even mention Russians in WW2 history, my dad knowing a lot on the subject (his father was also a heavy artillerist in the army) went to complain and the British teacher had nothing to say. He said there was nothing about it in the history books and that it was not true. 6 million Jews died in WW2 and even though that was a tragedy, 12 million Slavic people died and no one even knows that they were in the war. I am studying in a British Uni in UK now and one of my room-mates (who is British) asked me if the Russians fought on the same side as the Germans. So many people of my country died and my Grandfather lost a leg just so people could ignorantly forget about it 60 years later?!

And as for Americans they didn't even join WW2 until the very end. So respect to you and sms_117b for knowing your facts.

:S Are you fucking serious..? People don't know that Russians were in it? That they were AGAINST the Germans :S Whoah... I gotta sit down. When you think that people can't get any dumber you regretably find out that they can... Shit I really have to go cry now or something. WW1 and 2 is common knowledge, must know facts! And people still fuck up!? It baffles me, it really does

Yeah I was blown away. The funny thing is, she studied History in GCSE and A levels...

This makes me sad. Yeah, the USSR was about as evil as Hitler's Germany back then, but that's no reason to cut their contribution out of history! Stalingrad, man.

Also, I used to think that, as a whole, we Americans were the dumber nation. Now that I know about the sad state of history education in the UK, I'm starting to change my view...

 

[Woodsey]

Because they're idiots. Claiming anyone involved did nothing is an idiot to begin with.

Also, am I the only one made uncomfortable by someone describing themselves as a patriot?

 

[Dr Snakeman]

But I gotta say that Stalin's execution of 3/4th of his officer corp before the war was just hilarious.

Considering the state of the Soviet forces at the time it wouldn't have made a difference if he did or not. "Feed untrained, barely armed (if at all) conscripts into the woodchipper until it clogs up" doesn't exactly take a military genius to come up with. Even Zhukov had to stick with that general plan until the USSR amassed enough materiel to make a difference.

I've come to the realization that the "woodchipper strategy" as you've so eloquently put it has been the preferred Communist method of warfighting for the entire history of their existence. Off topic, but an interesting observation.

 

[randomrob]

The British held up the war effort for several years with the help of Russia before the American's rushed in at the last minute and took all the credit.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

But I gotta say that Stalin's execution of 3/4th of his officer corp before the war was just hilarious.

Considering the state of the Soviet forces at the time it wouldn't have made a difference if he did or not. "Feed untrained, barely armed (if at all) conscripts into the woodchipper until it clogs up" doesn't exactly take a military genius to come up with. Even Zhukov had to stick with that general plan until the USSR amassed enough materiel to make a difference.

I've come to the realization that the "woodchipper strategy" as you've so eloquently put it has been the preferred Communist method of warfighting for the entire history of their existence. Off topic, but an interesting observation.

I don't know that I'd call it 'preferred' but it was certainly the one most often used. Of course when the only thing your military has going in it's favour at the time is massive numbers your options are limited (I think it was Stalin who said that beyond a certain point quantity becomes a quality).

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

I'm not saying they didn't make a difference, I'm just commenting on Stalin's careless usage of life.

He was a paranoid psychopath in control of a totalitarian state so it's sort of the thing you have to expect.

 

[Pimppeter2]

The British held up the war effort for several years with the help of Russia before the American's rushed in at the last minute and took all the credit.

Well that's a lie. If "held up the war effort" means "not get invaded" then yes. Before the USSR and the US entered the war, Britain was on the verge of collapse. In fact, if Hitler didn't switch to bombing civilians and focused on the RAF, then the Battle of Britain could have been disastrous. Not to mention that the US was sending aid all along.

In fact, the inclusion of the US made the War impossible to win for Germany. The US was out of bomber range for the German ships/planes. They were fighting a target that they could not hit. As long as Britain and Russia didn't surrender, the war could not have been a German victory.

 

[rokkolpo]

i believe that it was the british that freed holland.

maybe your teacher is.....stupid

 

[Pimppeter2]

I'm an American and I think that America waiting until Pearl Harbor to join WWII was kind of a douche thing to do. We were allies with Britain before that and we should have been helping them the whole time. Especially when Britain was ALONE in their fight against Nazi Germany.

No it wasn't. FDR could not have possibly convinced the Senate of the need to go to war.

If Germany had not declared War against the US, the Senate still wouldn't have ratified anything but the Pacific front.

And the US had no formal military alliance with Britain.

 

[Death_Korps_Kommissar]

I thought it was that he was part of it, but because he was so beloved of the German people that hitler let him kill himself rather than execute him.

The nazis said he died in a car accident to keep the mythos of the undefeatable warrior alive.

Ireland doesn't to a huge extent.
Imean our President at the time, Dev, he went to the German embassy in Dublin and gave his condolences to them for the death of hitler. And after the war, Ireland was the first country who would play international football with Germany.Which is why, I believe, that the German away colours are green.

Hearing that the President of Ireland gave condolences for Hitler is quite odd, but I think that I know the reasons and it's always kind to offer a helping hand.

Yeah Dev was a bit wierd but you kinda get used to him lol.
He was really random during WW2. He'd ignore comands from the allies but do secret deals with Britan.
But Ireland was acctually pro axis at the begining which is a bit scary.

 

[Warforger]

Like I said, we came in late. France was pleading for help long before we got there and the UK was under siege for weeks, but we still ignored it.

Thats not justification for war.

All it took to get us there was the killing of some US citizens and a telegram to Mexico from Germany.

Thats quite alot, you have to remember, we were still undecided whose side we should join, even then there was not point in wasting lives on a war that has nothing to do with you so would be unpopular.

I mean, sure they may not have won without us, but look at countries like Japan, they took minimal casualties and held the Germans from capturing more resources and they also came in late.

Uhhh they were at war BEFORE 1939 with there conquering of Eastern Asia.

I'm not saying late as in arriving in 1918 when this started in 1914. I'm talking about ignoring the fact that it was happening completely until it started to affect us.

Yah we should totally start joining in on every war that happens overseas

If we showed up in 1914 instead of 1918, you think we would've won? After losing that many men; Germany was tired. The U.S. was straw that broke the camels back.

No, Germany was the opposite, it was pumped it was getting close to winning the war,France Britain were near starvation, Paris was about to get invaded and the war ended. The problem is that the Americans hit them hard and pushed them back to the same trenches the Germans were in the last couple years, then Germany surrendered before any invasion of Germany took place.

Again, Germany was just as capable as France and Britain, the fact that it was able to fight agianst the Russians AND pwn the British and French at war shows how bad Britain and France were at fighting Western nations in Europe at the time.

i believe that it was the british that freed holland.

maybe your teacher is.....stupid

......you mean this? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Market_Garden]

 

[TerribleAssassin]

We did loads! We did enough anyway, so that teacher is just plain stupid.


We held off Nazis in Egypt (CoD 2 told me this)D-Day, Op Market Garden, you name it.

 

[TheRealGoochman]

True the Russians were not well equipped/organized, however the Russian T-34 was a powerful opposite of the German Panzer IV--->Tiger....the German tanks broke down on Russian soil more than the Russian's did, and about the Russian guns jamming......Germans would choose a PPSH over the MP-40....the MP-40 would jam constantly in the Russian conditions while the PPSH could take a heck of a beating and still work fine.

German tanks were built for war, not snow. Beyond that you're not really making any significant claims- the T-34 was effectively on paper about as effective as a Sherman, and the PIV was a bloody joke. It was an infantry support tank that was mostly built with fighting light armor, at best. It didn't even have a machine operated turret- it was still using an outdated manual crank system.

Really what the T-34 was supposed to be fighting was something more akin to a Panther or a Tiger. Hamstrung production and shoddy steel quality by the end of the war made that not feasible. The Germans had the best tanks of the war, everyone else really fought more or less with tanks that were on par with each other.

The PPSH was a fine gun, but it stressed durability over, say, accuracy. No one cares how many bullets your gun can spray out when it can't even hit for shit. Meanwhile in the US Thompsons that are technically a generation old at that point still showed people what's what. The Germans had an odd affair with automatic weapons in WW2. Hitler honestly thought that infantry really only needed machine guns, rifles and grenades to win the war. So what you got were cheap guns like the MP40 that, while effective in the loose sense that so long as they could shoot they were good, they were also prone to being shoddy busted POS and other weapons that were just astounding- the KAR was a great bolt action rifle but it was about 30 years too late to be used in such quantities. Just the same the Germans came up with the MP44 which ended up being the precursor to the modern Assault Rifle. Through out the war the Germans came up with a great deal of technology that was superior but either didn't realize what they were sitting on, or ended up being a case of too little too late (The jet engine, for example.)

I do agree though with Hitler being dumb, he should not have attacked Russia in the first place (or not until he had a foothold on England) but he was so hotheaded and......well stupid that he totally ignored his top generals and decided to attack Russia anyway......in the words of Eddie Izzard "Hitler never played Risk when he was a kid"

Its not even that he decided to attack Russia. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

It's the parts where he basically rendered the German army ineffective by making it a massive game of in-fighting that hampered progress and left himself, whom had simply no military expertise, in charge. Some of the absolute worst military decisions of the war fall squarely on Hitler's moronic shoulders.

I humbly disagree. As stated by another poster earlier, the Russian tanks were probably the best in the entire war (save maybe for the late German Tiger) The problem was that there was so few of them. Also you have to realise that modern tank tactics were essentially invented by the German high command. The Russian civil war had been fought on horseback so most of the Soviet Generals didn't know what to do against tanks. (Likewise you'll notice the French and the British doing poorly at first too.)

I mentioned it earlier, but really for the most part at the onset of the war the Germans had the best tanks- Tigers, panthers, and other kittens- but simply didn't have the means to keep up with everyone else as the war dragged on. For the most part the rest of the world fought with tanks that were more or less comparable to one another.

Russian uns were hardly sub-par. The Mosin-Nagant rifle was aging sure, but so were most bolt-action rifles. Hell compared to the Japanese Nambu type 94 it was a state of the art weapon. The PPhs-41 sub-machine gun was "very low-maintenance in combat environments." furthermore, German troops actually captured the PPhs-41 for their own use. The gun had several problems (the drum would jam, making reloading difficult and dropping it could cause it to discharge) but it was hardly the worst gun of the war.

Sub par? No. But then, I don't think it's appropriate to compare anything the Japanese had to anything else, at all. They spent most of the war pressing advantage of numbers against badly equipped, geographically isolated units.

And, again, the Germans used the PPSH over what they had because it was designed for cold weather warfare rather than the European country side as a novelty.

But that's the thing......tanks like the Panther and the Tiger were built for war should in fact be built for all conditions....they only built for armor and power, and thus only useful in open battlefields, it was not only a piece of junk in bad weather, its weight would sink it in the mud, it was useless in cities, and its fuel consumption was through the roof. Again it was a powerful tank....but when it came to the bringing about of modern war and inner city fighting it was almost as useful as an 88 cannon and nothing more, bulk was its biggest weakness anywhere other than large open fields (as tanks). The T-34 though not being made out of the best materials proved to be more than a match for the German counterparts....with their "shoddy materials" the Russians were able to mass produce them, and design them to be more than effective in Russian conditions.
As for weapons, it was not just cold weather that proved German weapons to break but constant fighting degrades the inner mechanics, all the crap that actually got into the gun ended up causing the MP-40, MP-44, and STG to jam and a lot of times actually break. The PPSH though like you said lacked accuracy, but in close quarters combat like Stalingrad and Berlin, many soldiers would choose a weapon that could constantly fire and keep the enemy in cover rather and not break or jam, over something that when getting all gunked up would have to be tinkered with every so often.
I agree that the Kar-98 was a superior weapon, what it lacked in clip size made up in accuracy and easy maintenance and use.
The Russians had everything that they needed to fight on their own soil, and they used it all wisely (though organization and supply distribution was very lackluster). They made their weapons to best suit their environment, and they carried out the production very well.

I do totally agree though with Hitler being the cause of much of Germany's military defeat. He had brilliant generals and admirals, but due to his own ego and chip oh his shoulder he would not listen to them, the entire Russian campaign should not have happened on his part, choices he mad in Africa were very poor, and he made many blunders with Italy as well (and let's not forget his actions in June 1944)
Read the book "How Hitler could have Won the War" (or something like that, I forgot the title) but it lists mistake after mistake all with choices that if done differently could have put a major strain on the Allies and caused German victory instead of Allied......also while I am recommending books, for all you WWII French Resistance fans out there, an AMAZING book called "Wine and War" (two of my favorite subjects) it tells true tales (through interviews and records) of the resistance itself and how wine and the struggles of the vineyard owners themselves were some of the major contributors to the Resistance as a whole.

And I don't mean to quote myself but AGAIN for all you saying the US did a dick move by not coming into the war right away...
[quote="TheRealGoochman"

And the comments saying that we came in late and ignored cries of help, think about it, we were just BARELY coming out of a depression (In fact I think the 40s would have been awful if Japan's attack did not boost our economy....and don't say "well then we should have gotten involved" because if we got involved without our own cause (Pearl Harbor) we would not have the enthusiasm and patriotism that we had thus hampering our numbers, supplies, and above all moral (AND without the massive VOLUNTEER war plants and War Bonds we would not have the finances that we did to contribute to the massive operations of the war)), our army was not fit to fight (we almost had no army at all), and the risk the US was taking by sending supplies to England was great already (a lot of our supply ships were sunk on route) The United States was in no condition to get involved with a war with a power whose army was unmatched and no safe staging ground on European soil to engage it.

My views/WWII history buff coming out to say "Hello"[/quote]
It would have been a totally different outcome for the United States if we came in too early, and it even could have been a different outcome for the Allies as well

 

[HeySeansOnline]

Simple question in fact I was in history today learning about WW2 and my teacher said that the british didn't do a thing and that the americans oh the bloody americans held up everything defending the land.
For when I read the book then it was mostly in Russia and the russians did most of the killing and the biggest sacrifices.
So guys I'm thinking what did the british do?

P.s.I'm a british patriot (16) who lives in Iceland so the education here for history isn't exactly great.

I'm taking a history course at the moment and have always had interest in WW2, and ov er what I've seen you guys did kick some ass, you took out Rommel In Egypt, and held off Hitler's blitzkrieg, sadly I don't know more, only thing I know from Russia is Moscow and how they stalemated Germany there, I mostly learned about teh U.S., but It's not like we didn't do anything, we pushed Japan back, and were tehir at many consequencial battles.

 

[Troublesome Lagomorph]

That's not smart.
You'd think a teacher would know better than to say that the British did not do anything.
Who were the ones fighting until the Pearl Harbor?
The British.
The only person I've heard say that was a bunch to 12 year olds on Xbox Live, but that's expected.