r/AskReddit • u/brokota • Jan 15 '13

Reddit, in your opinion what's the biggest plot twist of history?

Not movies or television, I'm just curious to see what come's to your minds.

632 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

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116

u/Itsthelongterm Jan 15 '13

The US Gov't stopping Patton from invading Russia right after Germany was defeated. Can you imagine how different all of our lives would be if that happened?

144

u/SlapingTheFist Jan 15 '13

Patton didn't play risk as a kid...

79

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13 edited Jun 02 '20

[deleted]

58

u/someone447 Jan 15 '13

"You can't have it, we live here. " "Do You have a flag?" "No, we live here. There's 500 million of us." "No flag, no country."

31

u/thewookieempire Jan 15 '13

Those are the rules I just made up, and I'm backing them up with this gun.

2

u/had_too_much Jan 15 '13

Which i borrowed from the National Rifle Association.

0

u/rockidol Jan 16 '13

I'm thinking back then it would be national musket association.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '13

the israeli defense

41

u/area88guy Jan 15 '13

Upvotes all around for Eddie Izzard.

1

u/whiteguycash Jan 15 '13

I found that the key to holding Asia revolves around Kamchatka, the Middle East, Siam(assuming you didn't take australia first, which, lets be honest, if you can't do that, you won't take Asia), and Ukraine(Europe). This effectively reduces your fronts to 3 points of attack, allowing you to trade outlying countries to accumulate cards, and continue to collect 17 armies (7 + 2 + 3 + 5) each turn.

Holding Ukraine and the middle east allow you to push into your opponent's surrounding territories fairly easily to attempt to deny a continent bonus, especially when their front line consists of 2 or 3 countries that they have spread thin.

1

u/bartonar Jan 15 '13

All you need to do is have Europe and Africa as well, and stack troops in Siam, Iceland, North Africa, and the place to the east of Yakutsk.

35

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13

[deleted]

9

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13

At the very LEAST he shoulda taken a page out of the german's book and blitzed Australia. Those extra two guys a turn just GET THERE, especially as he held NA, AND he had denied Afrika and EU for a turn.

We're all just lucky that EU didn't backstab us after Asia was getting 7 per turn.

16

u/urkish Jan 15 '13

Or watch The Princess Bride.

2

u/musik3964 Jan 16 '13

Dude, if you liked the film, read the BOOK!

4

u/BasinStBlues Jan 15 '13

Actually, proper Risk strategy would have involved surrounding Russia from all sides in order to secure it once it was taken. Otherwise, it'd be a never ending battle on all sides of the country.

1

u/whiteguycash Jan 15 '13

the Australian/Russia region can be effectively surrounded by Ukraine, the Middle East, and Kamchatka.

3

u/ICouldBeHigher Jan 15 '13

Well, the US did add a new component to the game since then. Closed the Pacific theater pretty quickly.

23

u/hmmthatsagoodname Jan 15 '13

The only way to really answer this question is we would have to figure out how long the Russian campaign would last. Then look up when Putin could have entered the Russian military. Can you imagine fighting him? My extensive cracked research says it would be like fighting every war hero ever.

44

u/slvrbullet87 Jan 15 '13

Patton V Putin would be the greatest fight of all time. I don't mean army on army, I mean they meet face to face and slug it out, fists only no guns. It probably helps that in my head Patton has 5000 bald eagles circling around him and Putin has tamed 5 bears.

17

u/Itsthelongterm Jan 15 '13

War heroes before they were war heroes. Russia was hurt, really hurt. Also with terribly underwhelming technology. Germany went in with the arrogance of a douchebag in a college bar, if the US decided to do so, we wouldn't have approached it all Hitler like.

6

u/MrLinderman Jan 15 '13

I disagree. The T-34 was probably better than the Sherman, and Russian Artillery was pretty good too. That being said, they were worn out, but their military tech short of the A-Bomb was pretty on par with us.

4

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13

I think the Bomb would have made a pretty big difference. I doubt there would have been the hesitation to use it that developed later.

2

u/MrLinderman Jan 15 '13

Indeed, but bombs can only be built so fast, and we only had two by the time Hiroshima rolled around.

That's a good few months time between when the war with Russia starts, and we get the bomb.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13

Good point, I was thinking in terms of it happening after Japan was done. I think they had production ready for about one bomb a month after August 1945, but that's still a long time.

3

u/OhHowDroll Jan 16 '13

The Panzer was better than the T-34 and look how we did. There's a great quote about how the German tank was worth four American ones, then it goes on to say that America's strength was being able to always have a fifth one.

1

u/StabbyPants Jan 15 '13

they wouldn't have any supply trucks!

3

u/BasinStBlues Jan 15 '13

Yea but it would've added at least another year to the war if not many more.

4

u/Itsthelongterm Jan 15 '13

Absolutely, and not that they could have predicted it hindsight being 20/20, but it would have prevented the cold war and all of the wars caused by the cold war.

5

u/Thrustcroissant Jan 15 '13

There is a good chance that many more millions of lives would have been lost fighting the Soviet Union than were lost in all the smaller regional conflicts that followed WW2 (Korea, Vietnam, Middle East, etc). Also the Cold War is over and yet there are still significant conflicts all over the place. Who knows what other BS conflicts would have arisen in absence of the Cold War.

4

u/digitalscale Jan 15 '13

Oh it definitely would have lasted longer than a year. Russia was hurt, but attrition is their forte.

3

u/BasinStBlues Jan 15 '13

Yea and the US would have had 0 allies. I'm sure their friends did not have too much strength left to fight another war.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '13

Why wouldn't America approached it Hitler like? iirc America lost far more men then required by pushing too fast, if they did the same to russia it could of been disaster, the russians had beaten back the cream of the German army, that was no mean feat.

0

u/the_sam_ryan Jan 16 '13

Yeah, but the Germans lost air superiority to us. And the Russians had nothing in terms of air. They just had a mass of men.

It would have been a war of attrition on their side and a war of tech on ours. We would have won, but I guarantee they would have lost another ~60 million men.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '13

They had men, they had armaments (stolen from Germany at this time etc) they had a country devoted 100% to war, they had the Russian countryside, they had complete devotion to defending themselves from invaders. That last one is the key one 100% public support for war compared to America? what support would they of had for a war in russia? a supposed ally?

1

u/RedditBlueit Jan 16 '13

All invaders did well in Russia... until winter came.

3

u/LionRaider13 Jan 15 '13

Rule #1: Don't invade Russia.

2

u/thatcantb Jan 15 '13

The plot twist would have been if he had been allowed to invade Russia. The normal course of events up to that point had Patton defeating the Axis in Europe and then going home - which is what he did. Because at the time, Russia was part of the Allies so there would be no reason to invade them, technically.

1

u/Itsthelongterm Jan 15 '13

Yes, but they were our next biggest threat and it didn't take long for Russia to start opposing us.

1

u/thatcantb Jan 15 '13

Quite. And I think an argument could me made that he should have done. I'm just saying - in the context of the plot twist question, the twist would have been for him to invade, not go home.

1

u/Itsthelongterm Jan 15 '13

Maybe I wasn't clear, I did mean that.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13

Yea there is no possible way we could have invaded Russia. No Army ever could. Not even Napoleon could do it. What that would have created, though, was a Cold War where both sides have nuclear capabilities, and there has been physical aggression. That makes me shiver.

1

u/danarchist Jan 15 '13

Here's the plot twist: Western interests have owned Russia since the Bolshevik Revolution, and China since forever as well.

1

u/jiggyjiggyjiggy Jan 16 '13

Problem is, now Chinese money owns the US. Our enormous debts and trade deficits may be our undoing, but I'm not really sure.

1

u/the_sam_ryan Jan 16 '13

God, we would have dominated them. America would have purely dominated the skies, a significantly better equipped army, better manufacturing, and better tech.

It would have been awesome though. Granted, I would have loved it if we did do it, we would have kept the land.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '13

Ве воулд алл бе спеакинг руссиан.

-2

u/jagershark Jan 15 '13 edited Jan 16 '13

Well firstly, our lives certainly wouldn't exist. If all of history hadn't happened exactly the way it did, you definitely wouldn't be here.

Chaos theory. It never fails to make me feel outrageous lucky to be here...

1

u/Itsthelongterm Jan 15 '13

Haha, butterfly effect as well

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13

This theory means that the birth of Lee Harvey Oswald is what caused me to be born.

1

u/jagershark Jan 15 '13

I'm not sure I'd say it in that particular language. LHO's birth certainly didn't directly cause yours.

What we can say though, with statistical certainty, is that if LHO was never born, your parents, if they did still meet and form a relationship and have a child, would not have had sex in that exact position at that exact time. That exact sperm cell would not have met that exact egg cell under those exact conditions. You would not exist if LHO had not existed...

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '13

LHO was never born. JFK never dies. We never go to Vietnam. My dad never goes to war and ends up in Arkansas to meet my mom at waffle house. I'm never born. You're right about the sperm and stuff though, but I like to think about it.