Re: What was the biggest mistake made during WWII?
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kanman, what? We put all of our efforts into the pacifist not europe, it's well known and often pointed out that russia lost all the troops fighting germany not hte US, we donated a lot of supplies to allies but our main efforts were fighting on the islands and beating back Japan. Also it wasn't a mere formality entering the war vs. germany, a lot of people didn't want to enter the war, diablo said that the fact that the german's gassed the jews enticed us in... but that didn't really make one difference one way or the other, not in the least. in fact i think a lot of people were against entering the war in europe because they thought roosevelt was doing it to save jews. we only went to war vs. japan because our direct interests were attacked and that situation wasn't as clear with germany
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It's certainly true that more "stuff" happened in the Pacific in the early years of US involvement, but that fact really conceals the underlying allocation of resources. In the Pacific, there were a lot of naval battles and small scale land battles. Nevertheless, more resources were devoted to preparing for the much larger battles that took place in Europe.
For example, the first two Allied invasions in the Pacific were Guadalcanal (August 42) and Tarawa (November 1943). The US committed arund 30k and 35k men to these invasions. By comparison, the first US involvement in Europe was Operation Torch (November 42), which involved almost 75k men. Operation Husky (July 43) I don't have any hard numbers on, but it was more than a quarter of a million troops.
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