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the brain rot in this thread is real
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this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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The empire was falling apart in real time as colonial revolts popped off around the globe. Ending the European conflict so they could get a lid back on the rest of the empire would have been a better long term strategy than slugging it out with Berlin for another half-decade.
Yemen shut down the entire Red Sea with a few rocket bombs. The Germans could have choked off the UK financially if they'd been more patient and less eager to score smashing blitzkrieg victories in every campaign. At some point, the UK needs steel and fuel, and has relatively limited ways to get it without passing through territory the Germans could threaten.
By the end of the war, England was in a state of near-starvation. There's a great YouTube video of a woman who tries to make meals with English foodstock from the year 1946 to 19...90, one day for each year? The first couple meals are bleak and everyone leaves the table still hungry.
Britain's Empire was meaningless without a europe to sell the goods and resources to, the losses of all UK financiers' investments on the continent, and the reestablishment of trade on unequal terms is simply so counter to the UK ruling class interests & pride it'd take a comprehensive and devastating defeat. which it's doubtful german trade interdiction had any chance of actually forcing, and in any case they didn't have enough time for. Germans, not the UK who were the ones actually under a blockade, which is why they made the M-R pact and rushed Soviet natural resources in Barbarossa
By the end of the war everyone was starving. the UK was actually way better off compared to any participants besides americans (the whole continent)
I mean, what's the alternative? If the US hadn't charged in to save them, they'd have shriveled up and died on their island while Germany took over what parts of the British and French empires could not successfully rebel. Their merchant navy couldn't ply a sea dotted with German submarines and their military couldn't be everywhere at once.
The Germans could have far more easily and cheaply traded Russia for raw materials. Even had they successfully made it to Moscow, they'd be fighting insurrections across an entire continent. And it isn't like they were short on natural resources. They had all of France and Central Europe and were functionally in control of North Africa before the Americans showed up. But they were in plunder mode rather than doing economic development, so Russia just looked like a giant loot crate rather than a bear trap.
All the more reason to take your winnings and get off the table back in '41. Maybe consider doing another mindless intercontinental slaughter in another five or six years, when you've replenished your reserves.
The UK hadn't been ground under like Poland or France. And it hadn't half-exhausted itself in a war time economy like Germany or Russia. But it wasn't in a good position after Sealion. They were just in a proven unassailable position. That got them back to where they started in 1347. But without American aid (which wasn't a complete given in the midst of a recessionary relapse under FDR), it wasn't a winning position without access to oil and steel from the colonies.
Between German land-conquest and rebellions in Africa and India and Japan gobbling up territory in the South Pacific, what did the UK have to rebuild with?
Absent America and pissing off the Russians, the Germans had time on their side and the British didn't.
your argument is predicated on two things that did not happen, and did not show any sign of happening.
a) a u-boat blockade of the UK preventing them from getting resources from their colonies. this did not materialize in 1940 or 1941, why it must've in 42 or later is a mystery to me
b) some huge colonial uprising against british rule that could also cut them off from resources. in actuality there was what, Iraq, who got curbstomped? there wasn't as universal opposition to the war from communist/socialist groups because of anti-fascism, and some liberal independence parties wanted to leverage support for the war for independence afterward.
further, a completely twisted vision of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact where the Germans could afford to keep it going in perpetuity, when it was only going to go as long as Soviet leadership felt they needed for a full mobilization and rearmament, to then turn on the nazis. a delayed Barbarossa meant a stronger Red Army.
the UK was mobilized, several major industrial centres in the south were damaged, their shipping industry was damaged. i don't know what kind of point this is that somehow the UK having higher standards of living post-war, but also not as much of an economic disruption, means something was wrong with their capacity to prosecute the war? no idea what you're saying about sealion either
German U-boats sank over 2400 British merchant ships during the Battle of the Atlantic which lasted from '39 to '45. Less than the 3500 destroyed by the Allies, but hardly insignificant. The US strategy to beat the Germans was to produce ships faster than the Germans could sink them, and US-made Liberty Ships (over 2700 produced after 1941) were ultimately what kept the UK supplied.
Again, without the US, the UK could not have successfully maintained enough supplies to maintain their existing fleet.
That's predicated on the assumption that the Soviets were eager for a renewed conflict, when Stalin's "Communism in one country" model suggested they were perfectly content to play espionage games over the border without returning to the WW1/Russian Civil War era slaughter. Delaying Barbosa would give the Soviets time to fortify. But there's little to suggest they were eager to invade occupied German territory.
The UK had a starkly lower standard of living at the end of the war than at the start, to the point of malnutrition. And even that standard was enormously predicated on US support. If the US hadn't remained loyal to the British, they could not have maintained fuel for their navy or food for their people. The UK owes its existence to the US.
there's the word Battle in the battle of the Atlantic, 783 of 1183 total submarines and most of the german surface fleet were destroyed in this same period. they weren't sitting on their asses letting germans plink their shipping, anti-submarine warfare technology was continually improving and letting the allies destroy german naval assets. there's a kernel of plausibility in a blockade being accomplished with submarines, like Japan was by the US, but the germans are missing the essential ingredient to that: the destruction of the enemy fleet so it can't retaliate and protect it's shipping. even so, how long did Japan keep up the fight under a total blockade? 2-3 years? i'd like to see the state of the mighty third reich in 1946 after 6 years of blockade, resistance, and cannibalization of industry
just the universal view that war was inevitable, an ideological commitment to anti-fascism, and an unavoidable humanitarian impetus once the nazis start mass-killings? but they need not even advance, once the army is ready there'd be no reason to supply the germans further, precipitating their attack or collapse from lack of resources.
nobody disputes this, but you're refusing to compare them to anybody else, people were dying of starvation in the rest of the world, in victorious nations like the USSR even. the germans were dying in the hundreds of thousands at the end of the war.
exactly how is british people being a bit malnutritioned compared to germany's literal plan to starve millions of people because germany could not feed itself under blockade a point for germany being able to starve out the UK? your conclusion is a perfect opposite of the what these facts suggest.