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by throw0101a 1756 days ago
> is that the US won the 2nd World war

Without US manufacturing capacity things would have gone differently.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

Khrushchev:

> "If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs.[1] "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."

* [1] http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/khruschev1/28.html

* https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balanc...

Apparently something like one-third of the tanks during the Battle of Moscow were British:

* https://doi.org/10.1080/13518040903355794

2 comments

It's equally wrong to say that the USSR won the war as it is to say the US did, but the USSR unquestionably paid the highest price to ensure the Allies won.
While the Soviet Union had 20-27M deaths in WWII, the most of any country:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

'Only' about half of those were in Russia itself. Breaking things out by Soviet 'provinces', which are now independent countries: Belarus had 2.3M and Ukraine had 6.9M.

Absolute numbers also don't tell the whole story: 25% of Belarus' population was killed, while 'only' 12.7% of Russia's was. Ukraine, 16.3%; Latvia, 13.7%; Armenia, 13.7%; Poland, 17%.

While it's worth noting the individuals nationalities of those that died, you can compare any one of them to the US's .32% of the population killed to see the point I am making.
When a group works well together you can't find any single winner when they succeed. Russia and the rest barely worked together at all, but still worked together well enough that you cannot find a single winner.
Yep the US was an important arms dealer, getting rich selling weapons to Europeans. No argument there. It also helped defeating what remained of the Nazi soldiers after millions had already been killed by Europeans and Russians. Also no argument there. However going from there to say that the US won the war is unbelievably disrespectful to the millions of people who died fighting the Nazis for years before the US finally decided to play an active role.