In Why I Hate WW II, Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, explains that all the lessons of WWII are wrong:
Fact No. 1: They Were All Fascists.At a military level, let’s face a nasty fact: WW II was Stalin vs. Hitler. The rest was window dressing. Stalin won because — because what, he was a nicer guy? Nope, he won because his brand of fascism was actually way more ruthless and bloody and effective than Hitler’s smalltime snobbery, and because Stalin had the whole US industrial machine backing him. There’s no moral lesson in that that I can see.
Fact No. 2: The Holocaust is a One-Shot Exception; Genocide Does Pay.
The Holocaust is the next-biggest non-lesson of WW II. Everybody loves to talk about this particular case of genocide because it failed, or so we’re told. The Germans paid a terrible price for what they did to the Jews. Nope; the Germans paid a terrible price for invading Russia. If they’d stuck to holding their half of Eurasia, Stalin would have continued his love affair with Hitler, the only human being he ever liked, and the European Jews would have been a shared buffet, divvied up between concentration camps flying the swastika or the red star.
Fact No. 3: There Are No Military Lessons to Be Learned from WW II.
This is my real pet peeve about WW II, because frankly I care way more about bad military history than all that moral bla-bla. Every military lesson people want to take away from WW II is wrong, and the one they could learn is the one they don’t want to learn.
So for starters, here’s the real lesson of the war: military superiority in the narrow sense isn’t nearly as important as economic strength and propaganda working in tandem.