If you could have stopped WWII, would you?

[faded glory]

Have my squad spawn Camp Liege and park my l33t R-35 in front of the bunker door so the Nazi's couldnt spawn out. lol.

[Heresson]

Serb, if Stalin had just You on his mind, You would have lost without any discussion. Case closed.
Was SU growing before the war? Cementaries were growing in Ukraine and gulags were. That's all. SU had some successes - under New Economic Politics, but it was all halte dby dear Uncle Joe.

[Goingonit]

I'm against changing history usually, but for this case I'd make an exception - the 20m Russian casualties directly from the war, plus the 6m from the Holocaust, plus the ~30m casualties in other parts of the world, are too big a sacrifice not to stop if you had the chance.

I think if the Mensheviks were propped up in Russia and the October Revolution was a failure, that would take away a large part of the impetus for Fascism. As well, drastically altering the Treaty of Versailles would help the Weimar significantly and reduce anger in Germany. Finally, if the Dutch ceded Indonesia to Japan, they would have had no need to fight for their industrialization, saving millions of Chinese and Japanese civilians.

[Heresson]

Dan Severn, even the highest ever mentioned number of 20mln of Soviet citizens that died during the war is silly, as Stalin counted into that ones that died during the Great Hunger period. 27 milions is absurd.
Anyway, lets say that 15 mlns died. Imagine how many Soviets would be left after the war if they fought on their own... Anyway, this number also contains collaborants of Hitler., and the number of those killed by Soviets themselves.

[Dan Severn]

Why should the dutch have given Indonesia to japan? One foreign power to another? Appeasement didn't work against Hitler, and iot would not have against hirohito.

[Heresson]

What do You mean by changing the treaty of Versailes? When it comes to the Polish border, it was quite good for Germans, and they were still unhappy. They would have been unhappy no mather what. Anyway, if they weren't,
Poles, Czechs or whoever would be. And would fight.So what do You mean? Money? Germans didn't pay it anyway.

[Q Classic]

Goingonit:

Finally, if the Dutch ceded Indonesia to Japan, they would have had no need to fight for their industrialization.

giving territory to japan? BAD IDEA. what most of you westerners fail to realize is that the japanese during that time were... harsh... to put it mildly, to people they colonized.

their treatment of korea was nothing short of brutal, and their destructive rule of both korea and china are probably very close to stalin's abuse of the soviet people.

and you propose to give japan territory to avert a pacific war? to hell with that. they deserved every single bit of the destruction they received in the pacific war-- including the atomic bombs.

and the atomic bombs, well, the civilians didn't deserve it. it's just that the bombers missed choice military targets because of politics.

[Dan Severn]

Originally posted by Heresson
Dan Severn, even the highest ever mentioned number of 20mln of Soviet citizens that died during the war is silly, as Stalin counted into that ones that died during the Great Hunger period. 27 milions is absurd.
Anyway, lets say that 15 mlns died. Imagine how many Soviets would be left after the war if they fought on their own... Anyway, this number also contains collaborants of Hitler., and the number of those killed by Soviets themselves.

I'm not sure what you mean. Do you really think that the Russians could have defeated the nazis without any help? If that is so, why did stalin keep begging for another front? He would have profitted more from conquering all of europe, had he been able to. To win against the soviets, it would not have been necessary to kill every last one of them, if that's what you're saying. Like you said, many fought on the side of hitler. Doesn't sound like undying loyalty to the SU to me. The Russians came within a hair's breadth of collapse in 1941. Had Hitler taken Stalingrad, Moscow, or Leningrad, the war would have been all but over. It was not until 1943 that the soviets began to turn the tide on the eastern front. The coincides with the allied invasion of italy, BTW.

[Q Classic]

dan:

Although the brutal empire was done with Hirohito's compliance, most of the fault lies with Tojo and his ilk.

[Goingonit]

Hitler and Hirohito were fighting for essentially different reasons. Japan was fighting WWII because it was rapidly running out of materiel to supply its economy for industrialization. Japan, a country with a very small landmass, had 80 million people and precious few resources, especially oil and rubber. Meanwhile, the Americans were neing protectionist and selling to them less and less. If they had not thought it necessary to fight for these things, they would not have entered the war.

And what I meant by changing the treaty of Versailles is eliminating war reparations, which, though they were not paid in full, still contributed in large part to the hyperinflation that plagued Germany, and also by not allowing the French to occupy the Ruhr (which they did until 1923.)

[Q Classic]

i saw the change you made.

no, ceding indonesia to the japanese would not have stopped the deaths of hundreds of thousands of chinese and koreans. why? because japan would have continued to attempt to colonialize both.

face it, the japanese were savage and brutal people then, and felt no guilt and no problem with attempting to exterminate the cultures of china, korea, and taiwan in an attempt to make a japanese empire.

they deserved destruction.

[Q Classic]

Japan was fighting WWII because it was rapidly running out of materiel to supply its economy for industrialization. Japan, a country with a very small landmass, had 80 million people and precious few resources, especially oil and rubber.

not materiel-- that's military hardware. material.
and japan was running out of it, but they were already trying to colonialize the other pacific rim nations before the war. the fact the war occured was nothing short of a very much deserved karma, because how the japanese treated those in their "greater co-prosperity sphere"...

no. if anything, the war on japan was just, and therefore should not have been altered or erased.

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Goingonit
And what I meant by changing the treaty of Versailles is eliminating war reparations, which, though they were not paid in full, still contributed in large part to the hyperinflation that plagued Germany

Hyperinflation was not much of a factor in the starting of WWII.

[Sandman]

I find it ridiculous that some posters are justifying the Second World War for the 'science'.

There are at least as many inventions created during peacetime as during wartime. The only difference is that war inventions are given a special significance, whereas peacetime inventions are just 'inventions'. That's why people tend to assume that wars speed up technological development.

Telephones, television, electricity, cars, railways are all peactime inventions.

Looking at all these examples above, it's hard to imagine a situation where these technologies would NOT evolve into items similar to which we have today.

For every war technology with peactime applications, there is at least one which is completely worthless.

Examples include the bouncing bomb, nerve gas, advanced propeller aircraft (got superseded by jet), and V1 flying bombs.

[Goingonit]

giving territory to japan? BAD IDEA. what most of you westerners fail to realize is that the japanese during that time were... harsh... to put it mildly, to people they colonized.

their treatment of korea was nothing short of brutal, and their destructive rule of both korea and china are probably very close to stalin's abuse of the soviet people.

and you propose to give japan territory to avert a pacific war? to hell with that. they deserved every single bit of the destruction they received in the pacific war-- including the atomic bombs.

and the atomic bombs, well, the civilians didn't deserve it. it's just that the bombers missed choice military targets because of politics.

I really don't have any answer for you, unfortunately - I just proposed that as something I believed would avert WWII. Maybe a war between America and Japan would not have dragged in the rest of the world, in which case, of course, that would have been preferable.

Furthermore, North Korea has been rather brutal itself in its treatment of its people.