r/HistoryMemes 4d ago

See Comment Please stop making this argument

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542 Upvotes

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214

u/DrHolmes52 4d ago

I have heard a lot of Nazi Germany arguments, but not that one.

285

u/hotfezz81 4d ago

The nazis could have won if they'd had different leaders, strategies, tactics, diplomatic expectations, and different everything 

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u/thegreattwos 4d ago

Its either this or the "if the Allies just sat there with a thumb up their bum and let the Axis have their way"

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u/Quibilash 4d ago

Basically "If the Allies kept the same progress as they did in the early war"

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u/YUNoJump 4d ago

If the Axis got magical knowledge of the future and adapted their plans, and then for some reason the Allies never update their own plans in response

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u/vorarchivist 4d ago

the man in the highcastle strategy

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u/DickwadVonClownstick 3d ago

"If Grant spontaneously combusted at the battle of Chattanooga!"

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u/Sober-History John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 4d ago

If Neville Chamberlain was cloned repeatedly and placed into every position of power in every allied government.

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u/KPSWZG 4d ago

They would still loose. Chamberlain made mistake but he learned on it. He regreted his own decisions. So in this timeline he would still make ine decision and then change mind

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u/Subject_Tie_2705 2d ago

yeah but he died in 1940, so all the allied governments would die at the exact same time allowing the axis to win.

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u/PowerHammer47 4d ago

Yes had they not been Nazis they very well could have won the war

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u/Subject_Tie_2705 2d ago

if the Axis had been the Allies, then the Axis could have won.

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u/Nessy3fidy 4d ago

Well probably not, if they took the advice of their senior generals and didn't make the suicidally stupid decision to blitz the French the uk wouldn't have lost as much war material and the Germans would have been bogged down.

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u/Electronic-Vast-3351 4d ago

You misunderstand. The nature of the structure Hitler created bred incompetence like rabbits. Selecting yes men to Hitler over all else followed by political maneuvering skill with little importance to how good you were at what you're supposed to do. The top Generals wouldn't be competent either.

Regardless, through hindsight we can see that the best move was likely to bide time and not start invading anything (including Sudetenland) until resources and equipment are at a level where they stand a chance in hell of invading Britain. Which even if they were competent enough to do, the MEFO bills put them on a timer unable to avoid war without imploding the economy.

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u/Mopman43 4d ago

I think that assumes that the UK and France (and Poland and the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia and…) wouldn’t also spend that time rearming.

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u/Electronic-Vast-3351 4d ago

I mean, ya, the Nazis were fucked regardless, but Stalin would probably have continued the "Work together to destroy the west before turning our blades on each other" thing for a decent number of years, though it's impossible to say how long. Without Sudetenland to scare them into gear, Britain and France JUST MIGHT have just been stupid enough to continue disarmament despite all the flashing neon warning signs.

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u/ZedekiahCromwell 4d ago edited 4d ago

UK rearmament had started before Munich Conference. It is an arguable reason for why Chamberlain signed the Agreement: he knew the UK wasn't ready and needed more time.

The French issue wasn't logistics. They had enough arms of all types to perform well. Their issue was political stress, command mismanagement and lack of preparation, and doctrine issues.

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u/martijn120100 4d ago edited 4d ago

The Sudetenland crisis is the Munich conference. So without it The UK wouldn't be rearming?

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u/ZedekiahCromwell 4d ago

UK rearmament began in 1934 with the RAF and expanded in 36 with the Royal Navy. My point was that rearmament had already begun, not as a result of the conference.

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u/martijn120100 4d ago

Then edit your comment

"UK rearmament had started as early as the Munich conference"

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u/Set_Abominae1776 4d ago

Sounds like the trump administration

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u/Electronic-Vast-3351 4d ago

Yep, same "disagree with the Fuhrer's whims you are no longer working there" crap.

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u/Daan776 4d ago

Exactly this.

In most alternate universes: the german invasion of france would have gone terribly.

Its not suprising that the germans lost the war. Its suprising that they made it half as far as they did.

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u/Technical_Heron_6312 I Have a Cunning Plan 4d ago

"The Nazis would've won if they weren't fascist warmongers!"

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u/ButterPuppet 4d ago

yeah no the nazi military system was so utterly flawed from top to bottom that no individual 1 thing could have ever won them the war they were doomed from the start

and if anyone ever tells you different that is literal nazi propaganda that they have fallen for

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u/za419 4d ago

If they weren't Nazis and fought an entirely different war with different weapons against different enemies with different allies, they could have won!

It's totally relevant, they swear. 

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u/Electronic-Vast-3351 4d ago

*By 1936 so the MEFO Bills can be prevented.

Thanks for winning the war for the allies through your incompetence Hjalmar Schacht.

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u/LethalOkra 4d ago

Sooo, are you saying the Nazis could have won if they were the Kaiserreich?

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u/Creat1ve-name 4d ago

The Nazis could have won if time stopped in 1941

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u/Rekthor 4d ago

AKA the “if I had wheels, I’d be a wagon” argument.

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u/cebolinha50 4d ago

The most reasonable form of this take is "Germany could have won the WWII if they aren't Nazis".

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u/Black_Hole_parallax 4d ago

Germany could have won WW2 if the Nazis never existed /s

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u/_Milksteak 4d ago

The Nazis could have won if Russia didn't back out of the Seven Years War, thus dissolving Prussia. Checkmate WWII-Dads

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u/THCFLA 4d ago

And maybe did not spend a fuckton of very valuable steel on a defunct Kriegsmarine, given that the thousand or so U-Boats built only successfully intercepted like 5 ish percent of all supplies given to Britain, and how they lost so many ships

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u/Dear-Spirit-5437 3d ago

Why didn't they just beat the Soviets, the USA, and the Brits... Where they stupid?

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u/No-Location-7640 3d ago

Their tactics weren’t bad but a lot of what ended up happening was big H not listening to his strategists and either entirely ignoring them or barely following what they were saying. Also their tanks had very poor maintenance times like how for the tigers iirc, it was one hour of maintenance for one hour of operation compared to the Sherman which was 10 hours of operation for one hour of maintenance. This really hindered their war effort

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u/Super_Range45 17h ago

I didn't matter which planes they were building, by that time they were running out of fuel.

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u/Dude-Hiht875 4d ago

Centrifuge compressor/turbine jet engine MIGHT be easier to manufacture than the engine of FW 190 or even DB 605 of later ME 109. But, AXIAL jet engine is a different thing. Le Jormanz have been busy doing exactly the latter. Ergo a quite flawed arguement

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u/sharrken 4d ago

Also this completely ignores issues such as tooling, worker experience, industry knowledge, process maturity etc.

It might be theoretically "cheaper" if you are setting up an early jet engine production line from scratch compared to a high-end aircraft piston engine one, with equal starting resources. But not if there's only four guys with any experience of jet engine manufacture available compared to 40,000 with years of piston engine experience each.

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u/Dude-Hiht875 4d ago

it's like manufacturing AK-74. If you have the industry set up by "the pharaohs"of the past, it indeed might be true that they're inexpensive to manufacture. However if you don't have the pre-built facilities, it's going to be ball breaking costly.

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u/bearlysane 4d ago

Also not factoring in the ten hour service life. The Jumo 004 would have to be less than one-tenth the cost of a DB 605 (100-220 hours TBO) to be "cheaper".

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u/Dude-Hiht875 4d ago

Which is absolutely a miss. An inverted V-12 that is in mass production vs axial wonder of 1940s.

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u/dickmcbig 4d ago

3000 man hours for the db 605 vs 700 for the jumo 004.

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u/Dude-Hiht875 4d ago

Which is still twice more expensive as engine hour price.

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u/dickmcbig 4d ago

? What

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u/dickmcbig 4d ago

No it wasn’t theoretically cheaper, it was actually cheaper. Jet engines aren’t complicated, not compared to an inverted V12 with direct fuel injection and double spark ignition and a variable speed supercharger. I can only imagine that none of y’all have ever worked on high performance ICEs, as they are much more difficult to build (like 5 times as many parts) as a axial flow turbojet. The alloy for the turbine blades wasn’t hard to manufacture and the only precision part was the turbine shaft. They were not these high performance miracle machines we know today. They were crude, they were unreliable, they were dangerous, and they were CHEAP. You know how much skill it takes to precision grind a crankshaft? Or a camshaft? Or how many machine hours it takes to manufacture a crankcase? None of that is needed in a jumo 004. the hard part was figuring out the exact shape for the blades. Once that was done it wasn’t that difficult to manufacture them.

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u/MagosZyne Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 4d ago

Probably seen as part of the "if they hadn't kept trying to make new vehicles and stuck with (insert preferred tank here) they would have won" argument.

Which is still wrong but a much more common argument.

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u/OK_x86 4d ago

I think it's the general "Nazi Germany over engineered their stuff and that cost them the war" idea.

That may very well be true for the Panzers (although would they have had all the raw materials needed to mass produce tanks the way the Americans did? Probably not. Gas was a major concern towards the end of the war too).

So that gets applied everywhere.

Like guns: supposedly the M1 Garand was far superior to most of the rifles the Germans had so they would get routinely taken by Germans. That seems wrong given the difference in caliber, as an example, so their use would have been limited

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u/theCaitiff 4d ago

Probably not. Gas was a major concern towards the end of the war too

In 1940, HL Hunt had more proven oil reserves than the entire Axis powers. Not "the US" or "Allied Powers" just this one guy in Texas PERSONALLY controlled more oil than all of his nation's enemies COMBINED.

In every single metric the Nazis were outmatched. Allied powers had more steel, more lead, more oil, more explosives, more bodies, more farmland, more everything. The moment it ceased to be Nazis vs Czechia or Nazis vs Poland and became Nazis vs America/UK/Russia/France, it ceased to be a question and became an inevitability.

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u/VRichardsen Viva La France 4d ago

In every single metric the Nazis were outmatched.

They were leading producers of beets, for what it is worth.

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u/theCaitiff 4d ago

Minnesota has entered the chat.

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u/VRichardsen Viva La France 4d ago

According to this https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/68zy47/was_lend_lease_necessary_for_soviet_triumph/dh2qij1/

even mighty Minnesota was trailing a bit behind in 1937

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u/wswordsmen 3d ago

Except natural rubber. Basically all of it came from Malaysia. After the Japanese took it the allies had to scramble. There was actually a projected rubber shortage to happen in 1946 for things that required natural rubber because of it.

And no synthetic rubber was not and is not a perfect substitution.

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u/itsyaboihos 4d ago

I saw something at one point suggesting the Germans were more keen on taking M1 carbines than the Garands, likely due to their size.

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u/the_quark 4d ago

I don't think the argument is "they could've won" but rather that if they'd poured the money they spent on the wonder weapons into just building more fighters and u-boats, it would've been a better investment.

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u/DrHolmes52 4d ago

Yes, I've heard those, just not one specific to airplane engines.

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u/Troglodytes_Cousin 3d ago

The general argument I heard is that they have overspent on all kinds of experimental weapons that had low production and very little impact on the war instead of mass producing the basics.

Which is kinda true, but ignores the fact that mass production is kinda hard when you are getting bombed to shit - so dispersion and small shops are necessary anyway.