Best World War I Movies?

I started by checking my own Global 1940 map analysis document…

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/26161/global-1940-2nd-edition-map-analysis/33?page=2&lang=en-GB

…and the entry for Chile says “Chile, a country with close trading ties with Germany, initially chose to remain neutral (in contrast with many South American countries which, although technically neutral, tilted slightly towards the Allied side early in the war). Chile only started to distance itself from the Axis powers in 1943, when it broke diplomatic relations with them.”

According to this page…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allies_of_World_War_II

the “Declaration by United Nations”, originally signed by 26 nations in January 1942, was signed by Chile in early 1945. Chile was also one of the original 51 signatories of the 1945 Charter of the United Nations, and Chile also apparently declared war on Japan in April 1945. This page…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarations_of_war_during_World_War_II

…similarly notes the same declaration of war against Japan and similarly mentions none against Germany.

All in all, it sounds as if Chile was one of the countries (there were several, notably in Latin America) which spent much of WWII playing their cards close to their vest, and which only committeed themselves to the Allied bandwagon once it was clear that a) the war was nearly over and b) the Allies were going to win. Based on the other entries in my map analysis document, it looks as if, basically, the Latin American countries whose real inclination was to be pro-Axis spent the war pretending they were neutral; the Latin American countries whose real inclination was to be neutral spent the war pretending they were pro-Allied; and the Latin American / Caribbean countries whose inclination was to be pro-Allied jumped onto the Allied bandwagon right after Pearl Harbor. The reason for all of these positions (nuanced or overt) isn’t hard to guess: they were all in the western hemisphere, i.e. in the backyard of the United States, so they had to be careful about the public stance they took, even in those countries with right-wing governements and/or significantly large numbers of residents of German ancestry.

@Gargantua:

Where’s the option for Patton redeploying SS and Wehrmacht troops and whooping soviet but all the way to Moscow?!?!

That would take some reorganization and wouldn’t take place until 1946. German units would need armed, reformed and equipped.

Would the British and French allow a German Army rebuilt?

How would the communist in Europe react to a “workers war” of liberation.?

History has shown that Japan was more favorable to the idea of bring USSR into the Axis but that was more for selfish reasons; easier trade with Germany.

Maybe a movie about it will be made, similar to “War Horse”.

Guilt or innocence is a hard thing to quantify, so im not even going to touch that part of it, but on the waging a war of aggression, I can comment.

I dont think it is a crime to wage a war of aggresion, atleast not one they should hang you for. It is said that when a country wages it is only justified in doing so in defense of itself. How do you quantify something like that though? Japan felt that the US was threating it, threating to cut it off from needed raw materials and strangle their country.
Japan felt that they were acting in defense of themselves by attacking the US and the allies, were they wrong?

Jodl was a career solider, raising in the ranks and working his way to the top. He was no different from the 1,000s of other men who did the same thing, spent their life in the military, and did what they were ordered to do. In a totalitarian state like Nazi Germany one man and his cloest cronied have total control on everything the state does. Jodl wasnt one of them, and he had very limited control over what the German armies did or where they went, that rested with Hitler and his thugs. Hitler told Jodl what he wanted done, and Jodl was left to figure out how to go about it. To have expected him to disobey Hitlers would have been expecting him to commit suicide.

@balungaloaf:

without US aid assistance via lend lease, without the allied strategic bombing campaign tying up much of the luftwaffe and anti air defenses, and without the threat of invasion keeping millions of german soldiers in europe, the soviets would have been smashed before they could ever set up a counter attack.  if moscow was taken, the people would give up on their communist overlords and capitulate.

You alluded to the pressure the U.S. and Britain put on Germany; and I fully agree that pressure was immense. Even in 1940–before the U.S. was technically at war–its industrial production created profound implications for the balance of power in Europe. With massive numbers of American aircraft being produced and sent to Britain, Germany had to either a) find a way to keep pace, industrially, with the U.S. and Britain combined, or b) watch its cities and people be destroyed by waves of British and American bombers. The invasion of the Soviet Union was largely precipitated by the desire to allow Germany to attain the raw materials and industrial capacity to achieve outcome A.

However, keeping pace with the production capacity of the U.S. and Britain also required Germany to invest heavily in its own production facilities. That investment diverted effort from what would have been immediately useful production against the Soviet Union. During 1942, the Soviets out-produced the Germans 3:1 or even 4:1 in all major land categories of production, and even out-produced the Germans 2:1 in planes.

Prior to launching Operation Barbarossa, the German military staff had incorrectly believed that the Soviet Army consisted of 200 divisions. Divisions which had fought very poorly in the Soviets’ 1940 invasion of Finland. In the spring of 1941, the German Army consisted of 150 divisions; 100 of which were used for the invasion of the Soviet Union. But in the months after the invasion, the Soviets were quickly able to expand the size of their army to about 600 divisions. Given the imbalance of sheer numbers, it is very unlikely Germany could have prevailed in a war against the Soviet Union even despite its military’s advantage on a man-for-man basis.

the russian one was incrediable moslty the artillery barrage in the beginning was incrediable.