It was the Eastern Front and the U.S material support to USSR that really decided the war.
It's interesting to think what would have happened after Pearl Harbor if Britain would have not been so strongly involved. The US could have still sided with the USSR and defeated Germany. Without the Western Front the war between USSR and the US would have been more likely aftermath. Maybe we would remember in horror the bombings of Hiroshima Nagasaki, Leningrad and Moscow as the end of the WWII and US victory. (After Germans were defeated and surrendered, they immediately wanted to fight with US against USSR).
Churchill was far more distrustful of Stalin than FDR was. Even if the US sided with the USSR, they would have likely conceded to Stalin more of his goals. Also, without French, Belgian, Dutch, etc. resistance movements and governments-in-exile surviving under British support, the US would have an extremely limited capacity to occupy and rebuild continental Europe, and very little motivation to. Without the Free French movement and Charles de Gaulle, the only seemingly legitimate French leadership after the war would have been the very same government that collaborated with the Nazis, and the Soviets would have just summarily killed all of them and replaced them with their own collaborators.
It's also not entirely clear to me that the US would have joined the war against Germany at all without Britain already being in it. If Britain sued for peace with Germany, they would be unhindered in protecting their empire against Japanese aggression, while the Germans would be unlikely to cooperate with the Japanese against the British. Without Japan attacking either Britain or Russia, there's no reason for a Japanese attack against the United States to provoke American intervention against Germany. Britain's continued belligerency and the escalating American efforts to aid Britain without formally joining the war were necessary parts of joining the two wars into one.
Speaking of which, it also shouldn't be underestimated how deftly Churchill was able to convince the Americans--who had just been attacked by the Japanese, not the Germans--that Germany, rather than Japan, should be their first war priority.
We should be willing to see both sides of people like him and accept them both. A lot of people have the tendency once they think someone did something great in one area to deny that person's flaws in other areas. So yes, Churchill did well in WW2 but he did very stupid things in WW1 costing lot of soldiers their lives and was a complete racist.
Much of the horror at Churchill, in isolation, is completely normal and justified. The thing is, there isn’t really any single heroic historical figure who is uncomplicatedly heroic. Abraham Lincoln was a de facto dictator who violated the Constitution in order to save it, Nelson Mandela was a terrorist who killed people and refused to renounce violence, FDR interned the Japanese and had plenty of his own dictatorial impulses, Martin Luther King was a serial philanderer who plagiarized his doctoral thesis, Washington and Jefferson owned slaves, Isaac Newton was a complete asshole with eccentric and fanatical religious views, and so forth.
So yeah, true, let’s acknowledge the awful things about Churchill. But let’s not over exaggerate them or use them to draw a moral equivalency with Adolf fucking Hitler.
Exactly. Let's see him as a flawed person who sometimes was very wrong and sometimes very right. For current and past leaders this means we should carefully evaluate what they do and say instead of blindly following them only because they did something good in the past.
Although Germany had a good understanding of the treaties in force and cascading consequences for breaking them - and were ready to strike on all fronts following their Poland invasion - I didn't get the impression that they would actually attempt administration of all of Europe, unless their hand was forced which it was.
I didn't get the impression they wanted it. There were gripes with the Polish people, and a bunch of treaties that would have let that continue.
I'm sure its possible to find quips regarding a 20th century Global German Empire, but I don't think that was really a goal. In the European Theatre I just I think the whole thing spiraled out of control. From the extremist things I've read from the Nazi generals to the Nuremberg trials, I see people acting irrationally in a group doing things they wouldn't have individually considered. This opinion doesn't have a consequence, there's no forgiveness for what happened, its just a perspective I hadn't seen people really talk about.
Britain didn't have to back Poland.
Churchill was the cornerstone of Britain's continued resistance, and the primary reason they didn't sue for peace after the fall of France. Hitler would have let Britain and her empire survive had they left him unmolested; Churchill instead led the country down the road of stopping Hitler, ultimately at the cost of her empire.
> Up to 3 million people starved to death while British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies to the region. He bluntly refused. He raged that it was their own fault for "breeding like rabbits".
This is an extremely common criticism of foreign aid and even private philanthropy to this day, to the point where the Gates Foundation lists it as one of the "10 tough questions" they get asked: https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual-Letter#ALChapter5
I'm not trying to whitewash or excuse Churchill, but like many other historical figures whose actions and attitudes would be repugnant to us today (including even Abraham Lincoln), his failings are not as important as his heroism, at least to those of us living in a Western world that may have fallen to totalitarianism but for Churchill's resilience. Though I certainly don't blame your Indian colleague for his own perspective.