Japan Unveils Largest Warship Since WWII

@gamerman01

Agreed.

@Private:

Here is a different take that resonates for me:

I have seen it argued that both Germany and Japan* were strategically weak. Both lacked natural resources and needed access to those from elsewhere to maintain their war machines.

In the case of Japan that required secure supply lines from the East Indies, which their naval losses and strategic myopia denied them.

Germany needed to conquer territories that would secure those resources.

By contrast the allies were resource rich. Command of the seas gave access to resources from across the globe. Japan challenged US command of the Pacific for only a very short time frame. German U Boats did cause the Allies difficulties in the Atlantic for a longer period of course, but denying global resources to the UK is not the same as denying them to the USA, let alone gaining them for Germany.

Axis supremacy needed victory after victory in the face superior Allied production and manpower. The Allies only needed to deny them a sufficient proportion of those victories.

Of course, those that faced the Axis onslaught did not perceive any such “inevitable” Allied victory. And for a time those victories did keep coming …

*I include Japan in this answer because one of the reasons why Germany lost WW2 is that Japan never diverted enough allied resources away from the European theatre.

I agree with this, but that may not even fully capture all the reasons Germany lost.  In terms of just pure industrial production capacity Germany could not compete against the US, especially with the latter protected by its isolation from bombing.  I recently read an interesting book, Death Ride, that made much of Germany’s failure to develop long-range bombers, and with much of the USSR’s industry moved well East of Moscow Germany could not bomb it.  Göring apparently preferred lots of little short-range bombers to fewer and larger long-range bombers.  It also made much of the Germans’ decision to divert part of its Eastern Front ground forces to Italy leaving them under-supplied and outnumbered in Operation Citadel.  The near-impossibility of maintaining distant supply lines, despite Göring’s assurances that he could make up for it, have been discussed to death.

All-in-all, I think the reasons are so many that in retrospect it would have taken a near-miraculous perfect storm of events for Gemany to have emerged victorious.

Fascinating Malachi.
I am sorry I have not had time to read it until now.
I love German aircraft and the DO 17/217 was always a favourite of mine.

I loved Avalon Hill.

@suprise:

I like Stalag 17 and think it should be in the top 10

Love “Stalag 17” top 10 probably for me. Not ‘the best’ though.

Lets pretent Hitler was never born and the Weimar was in power.

As soon as you do that all events which follow change, so you can no longer use the same history for the hypothesis, since all of the events that followed were dependent on Hitler. No Hitler = no 1939 invasion of Poland. Other events maybe, but not the same. For all we know if Hitler hadn’t been born, Germany may have been invaded by Russia and the cold war may have been between a German victor and the US.

Hypothesis and theorizing aside: Germany was defeated in North Africa and Stalingrad at the end of 1942 / the start of 1943. At that point any chance of an Axis victory was lost (the Japanese were also experiencing reversals of fortune in the Pacific). The causes for the loss may have started earlier, but that’s when the problems created earlier became physical fact.

wonder how long it took them to come up with the chocolate bomb after the pea bomb sat on a shelf

(yeah i know it was wartime and everyone ate what they could, but peas? i’d be safe for a lifetime from that one)

He might of been refering to our huge garrison in Germany.