this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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Germany didn't almost win. They got extremely lucky with the invasion of France. The French thought it was gonna be trench warfare and unprepared, and the soviet invasion began right when the great purge happened. They got really lucky. Then the Yanks came.
There's a good case to be made that Germany would have lost the war even without the Americans entering. The defeat at the battle of Moscow was basically the end of German offensive capability; they suffered a disastrous shortage of resources.
If the US invasion had not taken place Germany would likely still have lost, and the Soviet Union would have occupied a large chunk of Europe.
Germany would basically be all but guaranteed to lose against the Soviets and the English alone. It might have become a war of attrition sort of deal, but all was said and done after Stalingrad
Nah. You're just repeating myths about the French. The French were not idiots and they did not think the war would be fought at the Maginot line. Despite how the myth goes, the Maginot line did exactly what it was supposed to do: funnel the Germans through Belgium and force them into a shitty river crossing at the Dyle River. This was known as the "Dyle plan". This actually could have worked out if not for the unexpected agility of the Germans and even more importantly: the fact that Belgium had left the allies after losing faith in them after the remilitarization of the reinland.
They didn't get "lucky", the Germans exploited fractured alliances and surprised the allies with their extremely effective and, at the time, novel use of the radio. Hell, they almost won the war before France even fell. Read up on the Dunkirk evacuation if you're interested. I'd wax on about it, but I've got surgery on about 20 minutes.
Ironically enough, so did Hitler. In between the invasion of Poland and the invasion of France, he allocated an enormous fraction (around 40%) of Germany's war materiel production to artillery shells - the primary weapon of WWI and the fundamental limiting resource for both sides during that war. Hitler expected a reboot of the prior war, with Germany holding off the Western allies with a small portion of their armies on the defensive while carving off huge swaths of Russian territory. He was as surprised as anybody by the rapid collapse of France - and was left holding a gigantic surplus of artillery shells.