Greentext

That's right - people who experienced WW2 would have been living a very different story.

It's only because it's been retold and edited and embellished over and over again that it fits our narrative arc so well.

People outside the Anglosphere still have a different experience. I mean, the whole "UK refuses to give up, fights for what's right" bit is... not how that is played out elsewhere.

If you're from a big chunk of occupied Europe the narrative is more Star Wars-y. The Empire has won, it's about the plucky resistance. Only a lot more bleak. If you're from Northern Africa... probably no good guys in this one. If you're in Spain it's more of a Game of Thrones. It starts in 1936 and it ends in 1975 after a very long timeskip before which a bunch of resistance fighters wait to take back their country holed up in the mountains and are betrayed by the US and UK because they worry about their ties to the soviets. If you're from China, the narrative doesn't have many people from Europe at all, but it sure has a whole lot of Japanese bad guys and an entire holocaust spin-off that somehow you never hear about.

They all get the Hollywood version of it, most people are at least told one alternative take at some point in their lives. I sometimes forget that's not the case with many things in the Anglosphere.

How would they talk? They speak different languages and there weren't subtitles back then.

"It just sounds too good true to be true"

- Anon, probably

There's a good case to be made that Germany would have lost the war even without the Americans entering. The defeat at the battle of Moscow was basically the end of German offensive capability; they suffered a disastrous shortage of resources.

If the US invasion had not taken place Germany would likely still have lost, and the Soviet Union would have occupied a large chunk of Europe.

Nah. You're just repeating myths about the French. The French were not idiots and they did not think the war would be fought at the Maginot line. Despite how the myth goes, the Maginot line did exactly what it was supposed to do: funnel the Germans through Belgium and force them into a shitty river crossing at the Dyle River. This was known as the "Dyle plan". This actually could have worked out if not for the unexpected agility of the Germans and even more importantly: the fact that Belgium had left the allies after losing faith in them after the remilitarization of the reinland.

They didn't get "lucky", the Germans exploited fractured alliances and surprised the allies with their extremely effective and, at the time, novel use of the radio. Hell, they almost won the war before France even fell. Read up on the Dunkirk evacuation if you're interested. I'd wax on about it, but I've got surgery on about 20 minutes.

The French thought it was gonna be trench warfare

Ironically enough, so did Hitler. In between the invasion of Poland and the invasion of France, he allocated an enormous fraction (around 40%) of Germany's war materiel production to artillery shells - the primary weapon of WWI and the fundamental limiting resource for both sides during that war. Hitler expected a reboot of the prior war, with Germany holding off the Western allies with a small portion of their armies on the defensive while carving off huge swaths of Russian territory. He was as surprised as anybody by the rapid collapse of France - and was left holding a gigantic surplus of artillery shells.

"you're telling me the world went to war over two cousins?!"

So the poor old ostrich died for nothing.

They can, the real issue in ww2 was mostly that the US appeared. During the entire war, their economy was bigger than everyone else’s combined, so whatever their course of action was it would be defining