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wahern 21 hours ago

> "If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view l several times in conversations with me."

> - Nikita Khrushchev, political commissar overseeing Red Army generals during the Battle of Stalingrad and later the leader of the Soviet Union, as written in his memoirs.

> "People say that the allies didn't help us. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. And how much steel! Could we really have set up the production of our tanks without American steel? And now they are saying that we had plenty of everything on our own."

> - Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union and the Conqueror of Berlin (AKA the guy who got Hitler to blow his final thoughts out all over a wall), as overheard by a KGB monitoring device in 1963.

@Sensei_of_Philosophy, Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryWhatIf/s/z7gcaTaxy9

defrost 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In addition, the UK and loose European merchant fleets repeatedly ran the gauntlet of German Navy, ice, and bad seas to deliver that material - so much so that

World War Two: Russian medals for last Arctic Convoys veterans - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-51726647

marcus_holmes 18 hours ago | parent [-]

yeah, they were heroes and I don't think I could have done that in the face of those odds.

marcus_holmes 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

fair points, but it still doesn't add up to "the USA beat Germany" or even "the anglosphere beat Germany". The Soviets beat Germany and we helped.

ericmay 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I wrote that the Anglosphere liberated Western Europe, I didn’t write that the USA beat Germany nor did I write that the Anglosphere beat Germany. I chose those words carefully precisely because to say “they beat Germany” while true in some ways would be misleading and would discredit the Soviet’s contributions.

With that being said, the Soviets allied with Germany to help kick this whole thing off, so while yea maybe they get credit for not losing to Germany they also reaped what they sowed.