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IlyaShpitser comments on George Orwell's Prelude on Politics Is The Mind Killer - Less Wrong
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It's U.S.S.R., easily. Why is this even a question? The US (correctly, imo) let the great dictatorships bleed each other. The US was a financier but did not do most of the fighting. The UK is a tiny nation.
Depends on what you mean by "contributed most". One reason for the high casualty rate from the USSR is their leaders' we have reserves attitude.
The Battle for Stalingrad, which is the beginning of the defeat of the Nazis, starts in Nov. 1942. What are the Western Allies doing then? Invading North Africa, which I think was fairly irrelevant to the outcome of the war.
Wikipedia says that 80% of German military casualties were on the Eastern Front.
My impression from reading When Titans Clash is that the USSR could have won WWII without D-Day. Obviously, it would have taken much longer (and ended up with Soviet puppets all the way to the Atlantic Ocean).
Considering how long and how much it took to defeat the Nazis, it's at least plausible that all three were necessary, or it would have taken much longer.
"Contributed" seems ambiguous. Are we talking about who took the most damage or who did the most damage?
By and large I think you are right. But I am also keenly aware that my opinion formed when I discussed the subject with Russian friends and family (and probably the same can be said for you). I've taken a college class on World War II, but I came into it with very specific beliefs, and so it doesn't seem terribly surprising that I left with the same beliefs.
It's not that I just have a bare, unsupported opinion in my head: if I wanted to, I could go on for quite a bit about the reasons that the USSR was crucial to the defeat of Germany while the US and UK played less significant roles. But I imagine the American readers of LW have equally good reasons why the intervention of the US made all the difference.
Really, the idea that this question is important to me troubles me more than the question itself, and I would rather work at disentangling it from my own identity than work at establishing the truth.