"Not 'hardiness;' 'slavery and ethnic cleaning.' We lucked into one of the most fertile and resource-rich places on the planet at a time when the people who had been living here were too weak to keep us from dispossessing and murdering them, and then we used slaves from Africa on plantations and the wretched of Europe and Asia in factori…
"Not 'hardiness;' 'slavery and ethnic cleaning.' We lucked into one of the most fertile and resource-rich places on the planet at a time when the people who had been living here were too weak to keep us from dispossessing and murdering them, and then we used slaves from Africa on plantations and the wretched of Europe and Asia in factories and public works projects to throw the economy into overdrive. Then we were the only ones that hadn't been bombed into dust as part of the greatest atrocity in human history."
I won't deny this one bit, but that's what made us a *regional* power. We emerged as a global power after 1945, and that was mostly because we waited until 1941 to get involved (not by choice) and only really got fully involved come 1943 when Germany and Japan had already exhausted themselves in fighting and had their logistical supply lines stretched out. We only really fought in WW2 in earnest from about 1943-1945, but we came out of it on top of the world. Then you had Bretton-Woods and the US being the only unscathed large scale economy in the world as Asia and Europe laid in ashes while the US mainland was left unscathed at a time when we had our domestic production in full swing to support the war efforts. THAT is what made us a global power rather than a regional one. We also had the most intact standing army leftover having suffered "merely" 50,000 casualties in a global war that took the lives of over 50 million.
The United States suffered at least 291,557 battlefield combat deaths in WW2, and at least an additional 113,842 military personnel deaths from other causes than direct combat.
We did not casually waste our soldiers' lives as the Soviet Union did, and of course we had far fewer civilian casualties than the countries fought upon, but it was no picnic. That second category being notably smaller than the first is the reason WW2 ranks below the Civil War, when two-thirds of military deaths were from disease and other privations.
We did lose a lot of people but our national infrastructure didn’t get absolutely demolished the way that most European and Asian countries did. And our body count was less than 1% of the total kill count for the war (<500k American KIAs vs more than 50M worldwide). That put us in an extremely advantageous position once the conflict was finished in terms of economics and military power.
"Not 'hardiness;' 'slavery and ethnic cleaning.' We lucked into one of the most fertile and resource-rich places on the planet at a time when the people who had been living here were too weak to keep us from dispossessing and murdering them, and then we used slaves from Africa on plantations and the wretched of Europe and Asia in factories and public works projects to throw the economy into overdrive. Then we were the only ones that hadn't been bombed into dust as part of the greatest atrocity in human history."
I won't deny this one bit, but that's what made us a *regional* power. We emerged as a global power after 1945, and that was mostly because we waited until 1941 to get involved (not by choice) and only really got fully involved come 1943 when Germany and Japan had already exhausted themselves in fighting and had their logistical supply lines stretched out. We only really fought in WW2 in earnest from about 1943-1945, but we came out of it on top of the world. Then you had Bretton-Woods and the US being the only unscathed large scale economy in the world as Asia and Europe laid in ashes while the US mainland was left unscathed at a time when we had our domestic production in full swing to support the war efforts. THAT is what made us a global power rather than a regional one. We also had the most intact standing army leftover having suffered "merely" 50,000 casualties in a global war that took the lives of over 50 million.
The United States suffered at least 291,557 battlefield combat deaths in WW2, and at least an additional 113,842 military personnel deaths from other causes than direct combat.
We did not casually waste our soldiers' lives as the Soviet Union did, and of course we had far fewer civilian casualties than the countries fought upon, but it was no picnic. That second category being notably smaller than the first is the reason WW2 ranks below the Civil War, when two-thirds of military deaths were from disease and other privations.
We did lose a lot of people but our national infrastructure didn’t get absolutely demolished the way that most European and Asian countries did. And our body count was less than 1% of the total kill count for the war (<500k American KIAs vs more than 50M worldwide). That put us in an extremely advantageous position once the conflict was finished in terms of economics and military power.