[Dormant] moved to !historymemes@piefed.social

India sent hundreds-of-thousands of soldiers to the European and North African fronts, though.

If you learn history by watching American movies then I can see people believing we won it.

But in school I was taught the old adage: American steel, British intelligence, and Russian blood won the war.

Where are you from in the EU? Cause that's not how it's taught at all, from my background. The USSR helped start the war and without the lend lease program, from the uk/us, would have probably been taken over by the nazis.

We do? Guess my history lessons didn't cover this. I thought we were all equal, apart from the US only joining during the last half

EU is not a monolith. It really depends on where you grew up. Here in the Netherlands we learn mostly about the Canadians, British and Polish forces and Americans troops. Since those were the units that liberated the country.

Then sadly instituted dictatorships in a lot of countries...

Similarly, I feel like Canada's contribution is overblown, but that's probably because I'm in Canada.

Some fun facts: during WWII, one of the biggest contributions the US made to the USSR war effort was food (as well as trucks to transport it). More specifically meat, since one of the side effects of Stalin's assault on the "kulaks" (or wealthy peasants) in the 1930s was the annihilation of something like 80-90% of the Soviet Union's livestock (the main effect, of course, was the annihilation of 5-7 million human beings). And even more specifically SPAM, which Russians often referred to as "second front" - a dig on the fact that they were getting canned meat instead of an invasion of Europe by the Western Allies.

If it was really important, they woulda made a movie about it! (/s)

We all rebuild our understanding of the past piece by piece! You're in good company here! 🙏

I’m an American who moved to Germany and it’s rough. I was a curious kid and enjoyed every subject except for history in school, so I retained a base level of knowledge in most of those subjects. I did not in history, and my dumb ass realized a couple of years ago that I wasn’t confusing them, there was both a Thirty Years’ War , and a Hundred Years’ War.

Anyway, I’ve been slowly educating myself about at least German history, and it’s a lot easier to get into it as an adult.

Taxes in India were significantly increased by Britain during the war, almost tripling if memory serves. India was still quite impoverished at this time, so it's no exaggeration to say that this imposition represented a massive extraction of wealth from India.

Short answer - British

Long answer - Colonisation by the British

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4

It's not too long (15 minutes), but it's a very good speech about the economic situation in India before and after British colonization.

as an Indian, I have heard people around me say, britishers looted all of our riches, the riches being gold from the western, central, southern kingdoms in both late 18th century and throughout 19th century; we had high taxes imposed and east india company had trade monopoly, then in 20th century the taxation was getting out of hand and a lot of indians were becoming slaves at indigo plantations, then slowly came the revolution and in mid 20th century wwII, some indians got control of our iron and coal mines, tata's and birla and I forgot, our mills and by now we had some educated-literate folks which led the revolution...

if you go on Instagram for a while and scroll, you'd eventually find some content with indians in the comment section blowing up about our past glory and ancient hinduism and what not. We lowkey still have tons of uneducated idiots

As an American, I don't think I've even been taught this. Like, we joined the war really late. This is what I was taught.