Can some explain to me how America 'saved' Britain / Europe in WW2?

Question

What was it that they did that means they deserve the credit for winning WW2? Was their reason for getting involved a philanthropic one or was it because of other reasons such as Pearl Harbour. What would have been the outcome without America? Would Russia and Britain have still been able to get the same result?

Answer 1

The Americans brought their huge industrial might into the battle. They were well out of range of the German bombers so could churn out much more hardware (tanks etc) than the British with no fear of being bombed. They produced better equipped soldiers and due to the USAs size there were more young men to be recruited.
Britain would never have been conquered by the Nazis though. We won the Battle of Britain and gained air superiority without outside help.( with the exception of a handful of foreign pilots) You must have control of the skies before you can invade. And they wouldn't have taken Russia as they were massively outnumbered.
The Americans didnt exactly save Britain as a nation as we were looking after ourselves. But their assistance in 1944 when we went in to liberate Europe was invaluable. The Allies wouldnt have had enough men or equipment without the Americans

Answer 2

Because the US is a bloody enormous country. They had more soldiers than any other (especially since the European countries had been fighting for a good 4 years before the yanks decided to help out, their armies had been greatly depleted), more money, war airplanes, war ships, etc.

I don't think the US would have helped out if Japan hadn't dared attack them on their own soil. Us Europeans are a tight-knit community, if you like, so when Germany began invading Europe, Britain and France decided to help their allies out, instead of looking the other way, and just allowing Germany to take over the world.

Russia and Britain might have accomplished the same. We'll never know, though.

Answer 3

In short; without the US the British would have lost the battle for the Atlantic, and thus the war. With the British out of the game the Germans would have been able to concentrate on a USSR seriously weakened by the loss of lend-lease support, the Soviets would have gone under too.

Without the US contribution the Germans would have won the war.

Whether defeating Germany “saved” Europe is another question altogether

Greetings, Frans.

Answer 4

Hitler's Downfall was, by his own admission committing himself to a war on two fronts. Failure to subjugate Britain
before destroying the Soviet Pact with Stalin was a recipe
for disaster. America's timely (or untimely intervention depending on your point of view) brought further pressure
on Hitler's War Machine, lets not forget the USA actively participated in both the North Africa and Italian Campaigns
prior to D-Day putting pressure on Germany who bearing in mind had to overrun and in effect put the Italian's under house arrest in their own country to stem the Allies Southern Advance.
In the end Germany's Industrial capacity was eventually broken by not just the Industrial might of America but the Demands placed on their resources in supplying the Eastern Front and five years of War. No single Country can lay claim to the Defeat of Nazi Germany, Hitler Destroyed Germany far more effectively than anyone Nation ever could.
Conquest is easy Control is not, take a look at Iraq/Afghanistan. Hitler would have eventually withdrawn from Europe even without America's intervention.

Answer 5

It is kind of arrogant for the U.S. to have claimed to have saved Britain and Europe single-handedly. However, the Allies were having some major issues by the time the U.S. joined the war. Britain was never taken, but France was. The Axis powers also controlled most of Eastern Europe, Italy, and sections of Russia.

The U.S. was important because it offered a plethora of fresh troops and munitions. This allowed the Allied powers to rally and start liberating areas under Nazi control. The U.S. was also able to focus more on the war in the South Pacific, then the European countries could. They were just trying to hold up.

The U.S.'s official reason for joining the war was Pearl Harbour. There is reason to believe, though, that an attack was expected in Hawaii and that it was allowed to happen in order to convince isolationists that the U.S. needed to get involved in the war. The U.S. government knew what was going on with the concentration camps for several years, but FDR would not have been able to convince the country to go to war over it without a personal attack on the U.S.

Joining WWII offered the U.S. the opportunity to try to deal with two issues at the same time, Nazi-ism and Communism.

Answer 6

Because they had the industrial and financial power...They could mass produce good weapon much more quickly than any country. In 1941, the Red Army was in deep s..it and would have lost but the US sent a lot of new equipment.
Historians recognised that the post 1942 Red Army had nothing to do with that of before plan Barbarossa (the german plan to invade USSR).
As for the UK, the RAF did very well, so did the Royal Navy (we forget a lot about it) but eventually, they certainly would not have been abble to sustain two wars (Europe and Pacific) regardless of the influence of the Commonwealth.
If the US had not stepped in, then Hitler would have enjoyed his V2 and new ultra quick Messerschmitt planes...

Answer 7

No actually saved directly, they saved Britain indirectly. It was the RAF that saved Britain from the invasion, Britain & Russia got additional ammo, arms and supplies thanks to Lend-Lease.

the main reason why they join the war is because of Pearl harbor and nobody expected it unlike in the movie.

the outcome? who knows? My opinion is when Stalingrad and battle of Kursk happens, the Soviet probably fought back and swallow Europe or maybe Eastern front will became a stalemate. Britain will keep on fighting, the threat of Nazi invasion is minimal due to air superiority.

Answer 8

Without America? Europe would be divided between USSR and Germany (I am sure they would reconciliate at some point), Britain, after losing its asiatic colonies to Japan, would be more and more isolated and it will be conquered ultimately - btw., for all of those who remember just heroic and undefeated British Troops - what's about Singapore surrender? Remember, what Churchill was most scared of - the German submarines on the Atlantic Sea, the supply bridge between USA and UK.
alternatively, after defeating German Troops, the Red Army would conquer the rest of continental Europe, and, ultimately, UK. It is just political fiction, of course, but there was very strong NKWD infiltration in Britain.

Answer 9

The nazis were actually winning the war, but the invasion of Russia by Hitler and the large amounts of fresh American troops allowed the Allies to defeat the Axis. In my opinion, Russia and Britain may have won, but there is still a good possibility that the Nazis would have won. With America joining, the Nazis chances of winning the war went down significantly

Answer 10

And don't forget that the Lend/Lease program to England and Russia made it possible for these two countries to keep fighting; otherwise they would have been starved into submission and the U.S. knew this.

And of course no country goes to war for philanthropic reasons. Every defending country goes to war to save its own rear, so to speak. The U.S. had been supporting England & Russia with the Lend/Lease program because the U.S. knew that if Russia and Europe fell to the Nazis, then the New World would be their next target.

The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor because the U.S. had been giving support to China, England & Australia in its war against Japan, and Germany declared war against the U.S. a few days later to show its support for Japan (Hitler was hoping that Japan would retune the favor and attack Russia).

The U.S. "saved" England by giving it the food and supplies during the entire war that it needed to survive, and the U.S. saved Europe by contributing to the defeat of Germany (until the U.S. got directly involved, there were no Allied victories against the Axis powers). Who cares what the real reason the U.S. got involved was?

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The idea expressed by another poster that the U.S. knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance, but allowed it in order to convince the isolationists to go to war, doesn't make sense. Even if the U.S. wanted into the war, it made very little military sense to deliberately sacrifice almost its entire naval force at the time that it most needed it in order to start a war. And considering how ill prepared that the U.S. was for war at the time, obviously no one in the U.S. would have wanted to get into the war as early as 1941. The most likely explanation for the Japanese success at Pearl Harbor was American arrogance. The U.S. had assumed that Hawaii was invulnerable, and that the Japanese didn’t have the courage to try to attack either it, or the U.S. Navy.