Did the Americans save our asses in WWII?

Any American saying something so obnoxious better have fought or at least lived during WWII. That being said...Russia defended its own borders out of self preservation and any benefit to GB was consequential. The United States provided desperately needed assistance to Europe when there was an alternative choice. Have no doubt that self interest was their primary motivation. However, the difference is that Americans died on a foreign shore, during a war that they could have chosen to avoid. Attempting to dismiss the value of that contribution as irrelevant reeks of bitter insolence. Those who benefitted most directly from a profound sacrifice, owe their gratitude for that sacrifice. Americans may or may not have saved your asses. They certainly risked and paid with their own though.

The situaton is actually worse than that, because even if they land successfully with a large force (which they probably couldn't do) they then need to keep it supplied. Leaving aside the fact that they had no suitable transport for tanks or artillery, delivering a lot of heavy equipment of that type makes the supply situation worse. The Royal Navy could completely ignore the actual landings and still destroy the invasion just by attritioning the supply barges over a period of days. Once the barges are destroyed, the more troops the Germans have in the British Isles the more troops they lose. It's quite possible to imagine a German army simply starving to death between the GHQ Line and the South coast.

The Germans need to not just land in the first few hours but actually break through all the Stop Lines and destroy the British army. To do that, though, they needed to land at least half a million troops, with transport and tanks, which is roughly what the German army asked for. The German navy said it could deliver 60,000 over a period of four days at which point the first men ashore will have started running out of food and ammunition, if they have not been defeated by a counterattack given that the entire force was only a fraction of the size of the British army let alone cut up into four slices.

Basically for Sea Lion to work even as a wild gamble the Germans needed about ten times as much transport as they had and that would have taken a year or more to build, at which point the British Isles have a garrison of over two million and no realistic force the Germans can assemble can defeat it.

I disagree because what the Brits discovered when they saw the US facilities that this was a process dependent on resources rather than inspiration and that the American development programme was making much faster progress from a late start. With less ability to interdict German developments (with a smaller Bomber Command etc) the Germans would have made much more progress.

They only saved us from an atomic threat from the Soviets and not a conventional one. The Soviet Army would not have continued rolling west after the defeat of Germany (assuming the USSR) was in the war at all. Wherever the Red Army stopped, buffer states were going to be created. I suspect it would be different in Iraq, Iran and India where it is likely that Stalin would have seen further expansion as in accordance with the historic ambitions of the Rus.

Britain did not rely on the Americans to win the Battle of Britain. We would probably have won the Battle of the Atlantic without American assistance. They were the only two existential threats to the UK during WWII. However, we would not have developed an independent atomic bomb more quickly than Germany and so it would have been a race between a negotiated peace with Nazi occupied Europe or mushroom clouds over London.

That isn't what Americans who make these comments mean

Do you think there is a West Germany without the US? Or even a Free France? The USSR may not have wanted to declare war on the British Empire but I am sure it would have made greater progress before the fall of Germany had the US not been in the war.

Of course not but there isn't an East Germany either. East Germany is an accident of great power politics in the post war era. The assumption by Stalin as much as by the West was that a denuded Germany would be stitched back together again as occurred with Austria. The new Poland was to be the buffer state in the actual end result of the war. Even in the Fulton speech Churchill assumes Leipzig and Dresden are on our side of the Iron Curtain.

With no USA there would have been a greater string of buffer states from the Oder to the Atlantic but the Soviet Army wouldn't have been on the Channel coast but stationed so as to fight a war on non-Soviet territory but with short lines of communication. As the buffer states were more remote from Moscow, they would have had fewer troops of their own because Stalin would not wish them to have foreign entanglements of their own. They would have been there simply to stretch the lines of communication of an enemy of the Soviet Union.


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Assuming that British forces could have made it across the Channel successfully, which is a pretty big ask given that they were definitely too weak to have done so successfully in 1944 without massive US help.

We also shouldn't forget the effect that the US had in the Pacific war - for example, by defending Australia, relieving the UK of a considerable burden and by taking the leading part in fighting Japan. Assuming a Churchill government would have continued to want to try to defend the empire, it's not hard to picture half the British Army being bogged down in India for most of the war.

Yes and no.

It certainly made the war with Germany a lot easier, but if the USSR still entered the war, we would have either won in a much more longer war, or done a peace deal with nobody winning the war. We would have certainly lost to Japan though.

We have to remember that 1) the Battle of Britain was won before the Americans entered the war 2) we would have still discovered the long range radar that saved our shipping convey asses in the Atlantic campaign 3) would have still discovered atomic bombs (we gave our ideas to the USA for the Manhattan project), but invented it much later 4) still broke the enigma code and know all about Germany's plans.

The only way we could have lost is if the Germans did not attack Russia, and instead invaded Britain. We would have most certainly lost then if the Germans managed to secure a beachhead and about 30 miles of depth. Once they've got 30 miles of depth, they can bring in heavier equipment, tanks, artillery, airfields and masses of infantry and then we would be truly ****ed since we didn't have the numbers to repel an invasion until much later in the war.

Britain was bankrupt by 1941, having burned through most of its disposable assets and gold reserves. Even before that, America was supplying Britain with food, (especially what) ammunition, and pretty much everything else, despite the rationing. The Lend-Lease program saved Britain. The impact of American forces themselves fighting was fairly limited, but the Second World War was a war of matériel, and boy, did America have that and more. Tanks, planes, jeeps. You name it...all helped increase British (and Soviet) fighting ability. Yes, the Soviets did the majority of the fighting, but Britain was on the ropes before the Nazis turned their attention to the Soviet Union...

For me the most important contribution to the war effort by Britain was maintaining the fight against Nazi-Germany, and although it may have been a 'phony-war' as some say, it was vital in allowing the US to move its superior troops and supplies into Europe as a staging ground.

3) would have still discovered atomic bombs (we gave our ideas to the USA for the Manhattan project), but invented it much later

With respect i disagree good sir. The lend-lease program had a horrible habit of sending heavily-outdated equipment and most of the US equipment that arrived in the UK was for US consumption upon the opening of the 2nd front.

-Francis

Can you clarify? It seems like you're downplaying by quite a lot Oppenheimer and Einstein. I cannot imagine that the UK would have beat Germany to the Atomic Bomb with neither of those two intellectual giants on the case.

And without the US providing the Soviets with war materiels, it is doubtful they could have been as effective at fighting Germany.

The US overplays its hand in saying they saved the UK in WWII, but it isn't without its basis in fact.

I don't think that is true; the British bomb programme was considerably more advanced than the German bomb programme throughout the war. In part that is because the German programme was a joke, but the British programme led the world until early 1943.

The British conceptualised both the uranium and plutonium bombs and the means of producing them correctly. The Germans thought a uranium bomb was impossible to deliver because they miscalculated the critical mass, developed only the least efficient of the three methods for separating U235 (which essentially made a uranium bomb impossible anyway; the effort wouldn't have been worth it), and blew up their only attempt to build a plutonium-producing reactor in an industrial accident.

The Germans basically gave up on the bomb in January 1942. They officially dissolved the military bomb project and handed it over to basic research, which then blew up its own reactor in June 1942. Since the Germans also incorrectly thought that a reactor couldn't be graphite moderated (the first US, USSR, and UK reactors were all graphite moderated) they had to use heavy water and this explosion destroyed all the heavy water in Germany. Note that America had done almost nothing in the war with Germany at this point.

The British meanwhile already had industrial production of gasseous diffusion machines which were the best way by far to separate U235 and would have led to a uranium bomb production capacity. Things could have gone wrong producing a plutonium bomb both in production of plutonium and design of the bomb but once ICI was producing gasseous diffusion machines there was really little doubt that Britain would have the capacity to drop Little Boy-type devices within a few years.

Now without the Americans that "few years" might have been more like five or ten than three, and ultimately I think neither Britain nor Germany would have developed a working weapon before 1947 or 1948, but to say the Germans were leading in this respect is not correct.

I think what the Americans say is correct but they saved us from the Soviets rather than the Germans.

We also shouldn't forget the effect that the US had in the Pacific war - for example, by defending Australia, relieving the UK of a considerable burden and by taking the leading part in fighting Japan. Assuming a Churchill government would have continued to want to try to defend the empire, it's not hard to picture half the British Army being bogged down in India for most of the war.

I think it is completely implausible to imagine Japan at war with the UK but not the US.

It is plausible to imagine the US being at war with Japan but not Germany, but if the US is not in the war at all then there is no Pacific War.

You think we'd have just surrendered in the Pacific to Japan? Bear in mind that that Pearl Harbour was only part of the wider assault.

You think we'd have just surrendered in the Pacific to Japan? Bear in mind that that Pearl Harbour was only part of the wider assault.