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thiagoharry • today at 11:54 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

Of course, defeating Nazi Germany was not the work of a single country. But it is perfectly possible to say that the contribution of the Soviet Union was greater, not because they lost more people, but because they defeated far more Nazi soldiers. The majority of the Nazis' losses were against the Soviet Union. If they did this with less technology than the United States and with fewer resources, that makes the feat even greater, as it explains the much greater sacrifice they made to achieve it.


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Dan_- • today at 1:14 PM

Sure the USSR contributed, but the rest of your post is kinda bogus.

Enemy casualties are not the objective of war. They are one means of achieving the strategic objective (defeat of Nazi Germany). Clausewitz has a good quote about this: “The true purpose is normally to occupy that point. Destruction of the enemy’s force is only a means to an end, a secondary matter.”

Further, war is fundamentally economic, so trying to argue that some less efficient means of conducting it is somehow superior is mind-boggling.

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