(January 3, 2011 at 4:03 pm)Welsh cake Wrote:(January 3, 2011 at 2:49 pm)Moros Synackaon Wrote: The US singlehandedly turned the tide for World War 2 with it's economic might.Great Britain (UK) with its empire was the world's economic superpower in question back then, not the USA. America supplied resources late into the war, profiteered and emerged in the aftermath as a global power while Europe lay in ruins. The single biggest contributor to the allied war effort was the Soviet Union, non-holy-crap, they practically bore the brunt of the German military, and those battles at Stalingrad were some of the bloodiest ever in mankind's history.
Britain was hardly the only economic superpower after 1900. Both Germany and the US have outstripped the British empire in GDP and such industrial production bench marks as steel production by 1900. By 1919 Britain had lost her position as the center of world finance to the US. By 1923 Britain had also conceeded she could no longer maintain her traditional role as the leading naval power and accepted American naval parity by treaty. By 1938 British internal policy had conceded naval superiority to the US, and also conceded the empire in India would be lost in 10 years and stopped training civil servants and colonial administrators for the raj. So hardly could Britain still claim to be the economic superpower at the beginning of WWII. At that time US industrial capacity was 3 times that of Britain and exceeded the combined industrial capacity of England, France and Germany combined.
