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Looking at the Second World War, it seems hard to escape the conclusion that it was prettymuch a clusterfuck of the worst possible outcomes that could have happened, one after the other.

For instance, the invasion of France through the Ardennes in 1940 was a very risky move that could easily have gone terribly wrong.

The French army had better tanks and planes than the Germans. The Germans only won because the Allies made a series of mistakes, the biggest of which was failing to attack Germany while the German army was busy in Poland in 1939.

If the Allies had pushed into Germany right at the start of the war, there was virtually nothing to stop them and the war could have been over in a matter of weeks. But instead, they did nothing.

The Fall of France was a catastrophe in so many ways. Looked at from the perspective of the Holocaust as well, it's hard to imagine how WW2 could possibly have gone any worse. The Final Solution was allowed to be implemented and to go on for years, from 1941 right up to 1945.

If Germany had been stopped earlier, so many lives could have been saved. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, if the Allies had intervened to stop him the German army was not ready for a war and Hitler would have lost.

It was a unique combination of absolute disasters that resulted in complete German domination of continental Europe by late 1941. The cost in human lives was vast, and it all could have been prevented if Britain and France had done better in 1939-1940. The Nazi occupation of Europe was not a foregone conclusion.

Thoughts?
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