Point of order: the war in the west never reached Germany. The Russians did indeed get inside Germany for a while, though they didn't succeed in doing all that much damage, and pulled out fairly quickly due to problems back home.
What you say here about the UK is even more the case for France. It was basically pity and the desire to avoid arguments with "Charles of Gaul" that led to France being considered as one of the "four powers" that defeated Germany. The UK played an important role, but the French got wiped out in 1939. Getting along with France in the endgame was important, though, as France was an important and useful base of operation for the land invasion of Germany from the west. Which meant that DeGaulle had to be appeased by being considered an equal partner. And I say that despite being an avowed and unrepentant francophile.
And while we're on France and the Marshall Plan, did you know that the amount that France spent after WW2 trying (unsuccessfully) to recover its colonies in Indochina is more than what they recieved from the US? Ireland wasted the money too, putting it into unproductive agricultural projects rather than developing an industrial base.
No, I didn't know that, but it doesn't surprise me. The hypocrisy of France after the war, with regard to its colonies, was amazing. After being invaded and occupied by a foreign power, and discovering first-hand what that's like, they just couldn't bring themselves to draw the obvious conclusions. I am not a defender of anyone's colonialism (too much of a libertarian for that), but I can't help noting that former British colonies are doing much better, on the average, than former French colonies. The French didn't do much in terms of actually helping the colonies to develop. The "White Man's Burden" propaganda in Great Britain was mere salve to the conscience, to a great extent, but it was still better than what the French were doing. The French did not see their colonization as a way to develop poor, backward primitives but, even worse, simply as a way to enhance the power and riches of France, meaning the hexagon (and, to a lesser extent, Corsica). Colonization is one of the biggest black marks in French history.
This is not in dispute, in fact I've made the same observation elsewhere. America was absolutely crucial to the post war power balance and the Marshall Plan was very much a part of their strategy. Even there, however, the common portrayal is that it was a struggle against the evils of communism whereas I would be inclined to say it is better characterised as a struggle against their greatest rival. I've no desire to minimise US involvement in the war, far from it, merely to challenge the tendency to overstate it at the expense of the contributions of others who just inconveniently happen to be her enemies now. It's good propaganda to celebrate your brave troops who saved the world, less so to celebrate the brave troops of a rival you have spent decades painting as evil incarnate and the greatest danger to the free world. Especially if that upsets the narrative that you were the heroic saviours who pulled everyone else out of the fire. Put it this way, how many portrayals of Chinese combatants do you see in WW2 films? Even Russians? Enemy at the Gates is the obvious example of the latter, off the top of my head I can't think of any major English speaking movies which focus on the former. Yet proportionately those Russian and Chinese troops were far more evident in the actual events. Also U571......
It depends what you mean by "fell". I don't think a German invasion was in any way likely, but it's possible that the UK could have come to an agreement with the Nazis. Point taken - in that scenario, continental Europe and perhaps the Soviet Union may have been doomed.
And the US would have been in no position to mount a ground war in Europe. Imagine how the world would look today...
It is quite possible that we might have given up on Europe if the UK exited the war. But saying we would have no position to mount a ground war seems a bit much. No position to land in Normandy yes... But in this alternate history we could have started in North Africa and then gone to Italy...
How do you imagine the surviving sailors of the HMS Gleaner felt about that film? You know, the complete fiction that the Enigma Code was broken due to the efforts of an American crew? Worst of all, an American crew including Jon Bon Jovi....
North Africa? In this alternate history there'd have been no British forces there, who did most of the heavy lifting. You'd have had to fight an entire additional campaign to establish your base of operations, under desert conditions.
seems relevant: In baseball, a closing pitcher, more frequently referred to as a closer (abbreviated CL), is a relief pitcher who specializes in getting the final outs in a close game when his team is leading.
figures... he's taking pride in a fictional victory... The depiction of American heroics in capturing an Enigma machine angered many members of the British military and public. The Allies captured Enigma-related codebooks and machines about fifteen times during the War; all but two of these by British forces. The Royal Canadian Navy captured U-744 in March 1944 and the U.S. Navy seized U-505 in June 1944. By this time, the Allies were already routinely decoding German naval Enigma traffic. While U.S. involvement in the Second World War commenced in mid-1941 with Lend-Lease, direct and open participation did not begin until the United States Navy began engaging the Kriegsmarine in the fall of 1941, months before Pearl Harbor, by which time Enigma machines had already been captured and their codes broken in Europe. An earlier military Enigma had been examined by Polish Intelligence in 1928; the Polish Cipher Bureau broke the Enigma code in 1932 and gave their findings to Britain and France in 1939, just before the German invasion of Poland.[9] The first capture of a naval Enigma machine with its cipher keys from a U-boat was made on 9 May 1941 by HMS Bulldog of Britain's Royal Navy, commanded by Captain Joe Baker-Cresswell. The U-boat was U-110. In 1942, the British seized U-559, capturing additional Enigma codebooks. According to Britain's Channel 4, "the captured codebooks provided vital assistance to British cryptographers such as Alan Turing, at the code-breaking facility of Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes." The actual U-571, captained by Oberleutnant zur See Gustav Lüssow, was never involved in any such events, was not captured, but was in fact lost with all hands on 28 January 1944, west of Ireland.[20] She was hit by depth charges, dropped from a Short Sunderland Mk III flying boat, EK577, callsign "D for Dog", belonging to No. 461 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and based at RAF Pembroke Dock in Wales. The aircraft's commander, Flt Lt Richard Lucas, reported that most of the U-boat's 52 crew managed to abandon ship, but all died from hypothermia.[citation needed] The real USS S-33 was stationed in the Pacific Ocean from June 1942 until the end of the war. She was sold for scrap in 1946.[16] The Kriegsmarine destroyer Z-49 was ordered on 12 June 1943 but never laid down, let alone completed and sailed.
Maybe it didn't come across, but I was actually acknowledging that your gripe about the film U-571 was valid. It's not only historically false, but in being so is actually a slight to those who participated in the true events. Don't hold it against us. Remember, we Americans still defeated Napoleon and his army of samurai at the Battle of Thermopylae.
If I recall correctly, the capture of U-Boat 571 created one of those surreal situations that happen in wartime. The Brits were able to keep the capture of U-110 and U-559 a complete secret. Donitz and company wondered why convoys were consistently able to avoid their wolfpacks and why hunter-killer groups kept hounding their boats but the idea that the Enigma was unbreakable was so firmly embedded that any suggestion the Brits had broken it was dismissed out of hand. The problem with the third capture was that if word got out, it would have forced the Germans to acknowledge, or at least consider the possibility, that the Brits were cracking their codes. I suspect the ship's captain who captured the U-571 couldn't understand why he wasn't treated as a conquering hero. The reality is that his actions jeopardized what may have been the single most important secret of the war. As it worked out, the secret was kept (perhaps as much because of German arrogance as British security) and eventually the Admiralty was reading Donitz's orders literally before the U-Boat skippers. What a dilemma for Royal Navy bigshots who knew about Bletchley Park! Do you tell your commanders not to try to capture a U-Boat? And now you know the REST of the story... as best as I can remember. If I have any of the particulars wrong feel free to correct them.
