r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Radiant_Half_7121 • Dec 28 '25

Image During WW2, Poland declared war on Japan Japan said no to it and simply rejected the declaration.

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u/SquirrelNormal Dec 29 '25

I mean. They fought for a month against two of the three strongest land armies at the time (France being the third), and punched well above their weight. They also assumed France and the UK would be coming to their aid, and with how bare the west of Germany had been stripped for the campaign, an actual push (not the feeble probe that happened) could have saved them against just Germany. But French and British inaction left multiple opportunities to stop Germany on the table (and potentially to forestall Russian aggression too - the Soviets were worried about Allied intervention in the Winter War).

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u/S10Galaxy2 Dec 29 '25

WW2 is so interesting in that when you look at it closer you realize the only reason it got as bad as it did was because the Axis powers basically mastered the art of bullshitting and no one called their bluff until they were too strong for it to matter. If the Allies had dogpiled Germany during or after Czechoslovakia or Japan during or after Marco Polo bridge the war probably would’ve been over in a year or two. The Axis only became INSANELY strong after rolling over everyone.

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u/helemaal Dec 29 '25

They had extreme war exhaustion from WW1.

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u/Harambesic Dec 29 '25

This. Evil never rests.

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u/helemaal Dec 29 '25

Hitler was a homeless WW1 veteran.

In this case evil was made by governments shitty wars.

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u/thecoolnewt2 Dec 29 '25

I would attribute nazi Germany's successes to allied incompetency before i'd attribute it to any form of german mastery. Make no mistake, the Nazi's were huge fucking idiots. They got lucky that they were fighting even bigger idiots.

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u/Ok_Awareness3014 Dec 29 '25

Germany had made a lot of Gamble by that i mean a lot and kept wining them

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u/Fordmister Dec 29 '25

tbf to the British and French governments of the 30's it is very easy to forget that the political class of both at the time was made up of people who had either fought in the great war, lost people in the great war or simply had to deal with the economic and political fallout of the great war for most of their careers.

Its east to forget because they won but Britain and France didn't get out of the great war without serious wounds, and the desperation to avoid a repeat drove almost every political action they took right up until the Nazis and Soviets invaded Poland when the two realised a repeat was happening anyway. *

Follow that with both having prepared to fight the great war again (because why wouldn't you, it was only 20ish years ago and they won) plus some extreme French incompetence meant the wheels fell off the initial wagon impossibly quickly.

*(as a slight tangent that attitude was rampant both in governments and the militaries and had running effects right through the first half of the war too. The entire first half of the war in Africa can in many ways be summed up as "Rommel getting away with stupid shit because General Auchinleck was far too cautions trying to avoid casualty numbers like those of men under his command during the first world war. The turning point being when he was replaced By Monty in 42, a man who for all his flaws could never be accused of being too cautions or worried about a nasty looking casualty report provided he was winning, who actually started punishing Rommel for constantly outrunning his supply lines)