which countrys role in World War II fascinates you OT ?

I'm fascinated by Germany's role Weapons/SS/Gestapo/Third Reich/Nazi. Before defeat gave world a big pain and sufferring for years to come.

Amongst Allied ( Great Britain,USSR,France,USA) or Axis(Germany,Japan,Italy) which country's role in WW II fascinates you OT ?

The British. The Battle of Britain is just fascinating.

For me personally, it's Russia. Kursk was the one of largest battles in history where at least 1.5 million Soviets and Germans fought. People usually don't know Germany suffered 70% of their casualties on the eastern front. Just amazes me those two countries fighting resulted in thirty million deaths :(

Germany a country in a depression transforms itself into a superpower

Switzerland, they bankrolled the Nazi's and aided war criminals in hiding their assets after the war, and afterwards kept the property of Holocaust victims and their surviving beneficiaries secret for years. Then a disgruntled bank janitor or security guard or whatever blew the lid off that years back and had to flee the country because the people were upset their allegiance to the Nazi's was exposed to be alive in modern times.

Anyhow, the Russian theater I always found interesting, it was the biggest front of the war and they ultimately invaded Berlin. I found the battles at Stalingrad, Kursk, Leningrad to be pretty fascinating. It's also neat to compare their weapons of war between the Nazis and the Soviets, like their tanks.

I also find the Japanese pretty fascinating in their war crimes with medical experimentation on the Chinese and other occupied areas, and their murder of the Chinese people. They did some really sick shit, some just for sport. They'd rape women, then kill them. They'd conduct experiments on living people like tie them to posts and detonate bombs to get an idea of the blast radius. They infacted people with the plague to see how it spread. They'd do surgery on people without anesthetic because it might effect their results. They were just as bad as the Nazis except many of the worst war criminals got to go home and live prominent lives as politicians and leaders of industry, which is no surprise why to this day they're in denial about the horrors that the Japanese inflicted on the world due to their aggression.

I've always found what Hitler did amazing ( taking over almost all of Europe in less than 4 years).

The man took a country with no money, and turned into the strongest nation in world. I can't believe Blitzkrieg was so basic, but appeared so foreign at the time. Hitler was amazing when it came to nationalism, and military tactics. Too bad we don't have more people like Hitler, but with a better agenda.

All sides are very interesting to study but from a military,tactical and technology standpoint Germany(and Hitler) was very impressive.

There where a lot more countries participating in WW2,not just those you mentioned.

Personally,I was fascinated by Greece's role in WW2.They won the Italians and made hitler postpone his plans to invade the USSR.Unfortunately though,they couldn't repel the joint italian-german attack,and succumbed quickly to the enemy.However,many people in the country formed rebel groups against the germans.

Yugoslavia also did that at a huge extent.

Even after WWI Germany was extraordinary strong.

I like reading about all areas of operations of WWII and the participants. There are so many battles or operations that do not normally get books written about them and some of those are the most interesting operations ever done (such as the Marines on the island of Choiseul in the Solomon Islands and the deception that they played on the Japanese there) to the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest where US troops were needlessly sent into the grinder for a piece of real estate that wasn't needed to be taken, but they got to deep into the operation to back out.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union, more archives are open to researchers and writers that allow for the rewriting of the history books. Books like Deathride Hitler Vs. Stalin: The Eastern Front, 1941-1945 and Bloodlands Europe Between Hitler and Stalin are able to be written with an eye opening look at what really happened instead of just what was available at the end of the war such as Stalin almost suing for peace with Hitler or the fact that both sides killed millions of people in the areas between Germany and the Russian border (Stalin's purges included) in the Baltic states.

Germany and Russia. Don't care for the rest.

You can say whatever you want about Hitler and his morality/ethics, but he was a brilliant man with an unmatched belief in his vision and trust in his judgement. You gotta respect that, massively.

As for Russia, well it brought about this very same man's demise so you get the picture. Stalin's brute force strategies and his indifference to the Russian death toll are truly formidable.

I've always admired Britain's ability to carry on as normal even though they got relentless bombed into rubble night after night after night for years.

I disagree with this. He had made too many blunders to be considered a brilliant man.

Well he did conquer majority of Europe, and he single handedly re-founded Germany's nationalism and pulled the country out of a slumber. He was not perfected and he was certainly an idiot given his decision to march to Russia, but that shouldn't majorly discredit him.

saying he took over Europe is giving the guy too much credit, Hitler himself didn't get involved in military affairs early on in the war, it was all his generals (the early victories in Africa for instance were the doing of Rommel , not Hitler)

in fact, as far as I know , he started to get more personally involved in the strategic planning of things later on , which is when Germany started to lose

But he has made so many blunders that caused him to lose the war.

1. Battle of Britain.

When Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to “take out” the Brits, the Luftwaffe sensibly enough began their campaign by trying to destroy the RAF. By the RAF’s admission, they nearly succeeded; in fact they were about two weeks away from pretty much shutting down the RAF and controlling the skies of Britain. Then Hitler got involved and ordered the Luftwaffe to attack the British cities instead, especially London. Which did nothing but piss the British off and freed to RAF to concentrate on regaining control of the skies over Britain. London burned, but German casualties mounted to the point where they had to call off the campaign, and that was that.

2. Cancellation of weapons programs.

After the Fall of France in 1940 Hitler was so confident of victory that he cancelled most weapons research programs, insisting that the war could be won with the weapons they had. Two years later when the Germans were being outclassed on all fronts by next-gen Allied weapons, the programs were all frantically restarted. Two years had been lost though, and worse, key engineers and such had died in Russia. Germany did manage to produce some impressive weapons, but never in any quantity and most of them never had the bugs worked out and thus weren't terribly reliable in practice.

3. Invasion of Russia.

There were multiple mistakes made here, just attacking Russia for one was incredibly optimistic. Compounded by a six week delay in the attack so Hitler could pointlessly bail out Mussolini in the Balkans. And then the Germans made no preparations for a long war because Hitler assumed Russia could be completely defeated the first summer. He ordered Leningrad to be surrounded, not captured! And Hitler fatally delayed the push for Moscow by diverting his panzers to the stalled southern front. Unlike in Napoleon’s time, Moscow was the absolute center of the Russian railroad network, and if the Germans had captured the city and the rail connections south of the city, it would have crippled the Russian war effort.

4. The “No retreat” order.

This is Hitler’s biggest mistake in Russia and one of the biggest military blunders of all time. When the war in Russia started going badly during the first winter, Hitler ordered his troops to never retreat under any circumstances. This is insane in general because there’s no point standing your ground if you are outnumbered and getting the crap beat out of you. Doubly insane because the only real advantage the Germans had over the Russians was that the German troops were far more mobile. So it made far more sense to retreat when attacked and then counterattack, after he Russians had advanced beyond their supply lines. The one German general with the stones to defy Hitler, Manstein, did this a number of times with devastating effect.

5.c Me-262 as a bomber.

The Me-262 was a beautiful plane, in some ways a decade or more before its time. It was the world’s first jet interceptor and could fly rings (literally) around the best Allied planes of the time. The Me-262 was conceived, designed, and developed as a jet interceptor, a plane specifically designed to hunt down and destroy Allied planes. Hitler ordered it into full production … as a bomber. His minions nodded, and quietly continued to develop it as an interceptor. Someone tipped Hitler off though, and he made sure it was developed as a bomber. In trial runs few pilots were even able to get their bombs within a mile of the targets. The Me-262 was a complete (and predictable) failure as a bomber. By the time a few Me-262 interceptors saw action they were too few too late to change anything.

6. No women labourers.

Did the Nazis use slave labour in their factories because they were mean people? Well, yes, but they were also motivated by a severe shortage of factory labour … because Hitler had decreed that German women were not to do factory work. Millions of American and British women went to work on assembly lines freeing up millions of men for military duty. The Germans suffered terrible manpower shortages during the war, while millions of German women sat at home.

7. War on USA.

Hitler declared war on the USA right after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Why? He thought it would be good for morale. (Most of his dumbfuck ideas were based on thinking like that.) Maybe the USA would have declared war on him anyhow, but it was crazy to simply give Roosevelt what he wanted.

8. More Russian errors.

In i942 Hitler ordered his armies to seize the oil fields in the Caucasus and the city of Stalingrad, spreading his armies far too thin. As a result his forces failed to capture the oil fields, and suffered crippling losses at Stalingrad.

9. The Battle of Kursk.

At Kursk in 1943 Hitler ordered a massive attack even though the Russians clearly knew he would attack Kursk. The German armies last great offensive flung themselves against massed Russian defenders dug in with huge numbers of anti-tank weapons and legions of modern Russian tanks. It was the biggest tank battle in history, and a crushing defeat for Germany. The battle of Stalingrad guaranteed that Germany was not going to win its war with Russia, Kursk guaranteed that the Russians would win.

10. Battle of the Bulge.

Hitler’s last gasp attempt to win the war. He attempted to repeat his success of 1940 by attacking the Allies the exact same way. Even though his forces were vastly smaller, didn’t have the fuel to do the job, and were facing a vastly superior enemy than the French army of 1940. The attack had zero chance of success, it would have been far more sensible to attack the Russians and try to slow down their advance.

The Fatherland for sure.

Weimar Germany was already an economic powerhouse in Europe prior to Hitler's rising to power (and undoubtedly much healthier and stronger than Nazi Germany at the core), it was just going through the Great Depression like all the other countries. Hitler was not a brilliant man, he was a very charismatic but foolish one who took a great nation at the forefront of the world industrially and intellectually and created a backwards, totalitarian state that persecuted its own citizens and lost 10% of its people and a third of its territory in a pointless war that he himself sabotaged through a variety of blunders. It also paved the way for the creation of the Warsaw Pact and placed a hundred million Eastern & Central Europeans under the suzerainty of the oppressive U.S.S.R..

A truly brilliant man would have pulled the Germans out of their economic slump, curbed the Germans' racial supremacism, ended the Franco-German enmity, created a strong relationship between the Polish and the Germans as a regional power against the Soviets and reestablished Germany as a respectable Great Power. I don't know if this could have been achieved by a single man in such a short period of time back then but these steps and goals are far better than the 8 million Germans, 6 million Jews and 50-70 million other people dead that we actually got.

6Wikipedia: Year 6 (VI) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. →

@Barbariser: @deeliman:

The European Theatre by far, and Germany's role in how it all played out.

The Balkan fronts in WW2 were quite brutal as well, until the Soviets came in later in liberating

Serbia from the Nazi puppet controlled gov. With the aid of the local fighters.

The Russian Eastern Fronts is something to remember.

I always liked the Pacific theater. Big battles involving a lot of naval and air power. Always loved the story of how 4 american destroyers and badly equipped carrier aircraft managed to hold off one of the largest naval fleets Japan ever sent out (including battleships like the Yamato). That task force charged ahead and held the line with such ferocity that they convinced the Japanese that they were a much bigger force and then retreated. If that isn't an epic battle, I don't know what is.

Also have a soft spot for Greece. Recovering from the Balkan Wars and even their liberation from the Ottomans, they held off the Italians before Germany intervened. Even then, resistance was fierce. My grand-father's told me stories of how his neighbours dug up weapons from the early 1800s to fight the Germans. Once they shot German paratroopers out of the sky, they would take their own weapons and use them against them. Efforts to help resistance members from the British even helped the beginning of a communist mouvement in greece, which has affected Greece even to this day.

The US. Back to back World War champs, baby

The whole ordeal and time period attracts me in many ways. If I had a life previously, it was then.

I couldn't pin down any individual 'country'. I'd have to say the Soviet Union, Germany and Finland equally hold the majority of my interests. Of course the Eastern Front as a whole is my main interest, the most crucial theatre of the war in my opinion, in scope and size, as well as the most brutal, it presented the 'turning point'.

The US, I always found it fascinating that in WW1 the US had the smallest army in the world, no navy, tiny amount of deaths, fought in only 1 major offensive (an offensive where half the soldiers were French), they weren't even an economic power house, but come WW2 that had completely changed and instead of no one taking them seriously (Woodrow Wilson was repeatedly laughed at by both sides) they had become the most powerful nation almost over night.

germany, love to see how the fascists lost F*ck them

Canada did a great job, doing more than double the recon work and giving more frequent, and more reliable intel than both the US and England

And of course Juno.

Hitler was a genius when it came to manipulation although w/o Goebbels I doubt he would have been AS effective. Militarily though? he proved himself to be quite the amateur. Between ignoring the wishes of his Field Marshals and being addicted to drugs, it was a recipe destined for failure. Hitler had a false sense of security thanks to his humiliating defeat of both Poland and France. The U.S.S.R. and the United States were underestimated in their ability and determination.

I like the way the U.S. came in at the end and claimed to save everything :)

Especially as the only came in for cash and the UK is still paying them back for it. Was a monetary deal.

Someone doesn't know much about the U.S in WW2.

The Soviet Union was fascinating to me, just the whole Eastern front was interesting to me. It literally was as if hell opened on Earth. The Russians were very resilient country and sacrificed the most in WW2.