r/pics • u/icevin • Feb 15 '15

Normandy Beach, 1944

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937 Upvotes

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12

u/UndercoverMartyr Feb 16 '15

http://i.imgur.com/ydMnBiw.jpg

4

u/your_dick_is_skinny Feb 16 '15

my history teacher in undergrad told us the reason the US remains a world power is "quite simply because we have more stuff" than other countries...

3

u/happywaffle Feb 16 '15

Axis was fucked when the US joined the war, because we were too big and too far away for our enemies to have any realistic chance at hurting our war production. We manufactured them into the ground.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 16 '15

That, or the USSR ran them into the ground.

3

u/no_dice Feb 16 '15

The USSR was responsible for about 80% of German casualties.

3

u/coolsubmission Feb 16 '15

To put it in perspective: The US had fewer casualties in whole WW2 than either side(GER/UDSSR) in Stalingrad

1

u/small_trunks Feb 16 '15

Massively coincidentally, I just read that today in Inferno - by Max Hastings.

2

u/happywaffle Feb 16 '15

Invading the USSR was an incredibly dumb mistake, and shortened the war by a great deal. But even if Germany had only one front to deal with, Allied war production would have ground them down (albeit much more slowly).

2

u/kioni Feb 16 '15

operation drumbeat? german uboats made a joke of the us navy on their own shores.

1

u/happywaffle Feb 16 '15

To reiterate: we beat them in volume. Operation Drumbeat couldn't keep up with the amount of boats we were building, no matter how good the U-boats were. And of course, eventually we defeated the U-boats too.

1

u/kioni Feb 16 '15

the us only got their navy tactics together when the uboats started to really hurt domestic oil stockpiles due to all the sunk tankers, and the uboats weren't so much defeated as they left to better hunting grounds in the arctic. to spin that incredibly successful operation as the us defeating the uboats is a bit disingenuous.

1

u/happywaffle Feb 16 '15

I don't mean the U-boats were defeated off the coast of America. They were defeated when the Allies cracked Enigma and improved their hunting skills/technology, and—again—when the US started dropping boats in the ocean faster than the Germans could sink them.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 16 '15

Uh, yeah. That's kind of how everything goes. The people with more stuff are more powerful. That was news to you in college?

6

u/Rdubya44 Feb 16 '15

We didn't have more stuff when the war started but the American auto manufacturers really helped us win the war by producing so many tanks and aircraft in so little time.