Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

Little known fact. Hitler declared war on the USA.

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

Also the GG's decision was supported at the following election when Labor lost a whole mess of seats.

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

Exactly. :thumbup:

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

Britain lost the biggest empire ever known to pay for that material assistance and has only just stopped paying back that debt.
Most americans who fought in europe were fighting less than one year and had never seen action before that date. They fought over ground with total air superiority and with overwhelming material support against an exhausted enemy.

To imply that america did these things out of the goodness of their hearts is just plain wrong.
They sold the goods to pay for the war but britain paid for it.

If a russian had used worzels ill informed cannon fodder comment then i could understand it but it was not australians used to bleed the germans dry, it was russian lives.

Yank aircrew- it was american politics that made them fly in the daytime and so cost so many lives.
pacific island hopping -america could have bypassed but they wanted airbases for the future as much as winning that local conflict.

could japan have invaded australia, yes! but how could they ever hold such a large island when they were over-extended elsewhere.

i have full and honest respect for all of those old boys who pulled on a uniform, from all sides. people were killed on all sides. i cant see how it helps to try and score points on an internet forum.

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

When I read the first post I didn't know it related to the 2nd World War. If so it should have just been the Americanization of the world which they made more ground with by sending in coca cola, pepsi and Mcdonalds with a slower loss of life due to obesity and clogged arteries.

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

It was logistically impossible. Say the Japs had managed to take New Guinea. At best they would have been seriously depleted and basically, knackered. Their supply lines were huge. It would have taken months to get back in to shape. By then the Aussie Imperial force would have been back in Australia, combat seasoned and ready to fight. US Army and Marines would have been here too. The Japs would have been continuously harrassed from the sea and air. Say they had managed to get ashore at Darwin. Then what? There was nothing there. Anything they needed to capture was 1000's of kms away. They would have been under constant attack. If they had tried to move down the East Coast to invade Queensland they would have been hammered from the air and sea. They would have needed all their carriers which would have been very vulnerable to land-based airpower. The US Navy would have had the Battle of Midway off Australia instead. Even without the USA it was never going to happen, just like the German invasion of Britain was never going to happen. We now know that Germany and Japan were never really serious about invading the UK or Australia anyway.

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

Is the donut in the post?

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

At the time the OZ govt took the Japanese threat VERY seriously, and they had to or else be completely irresponsible and reckless. They were so convinced of the possibility of a Japanese invasion that they decided to let the Japanese have everything north of Brisbane and defend the rest.This policy was called 'The Brisbane Line'

It's easy for academics or whoever to speculate 60 odd years after the event but I suspect the real truth is something we might never know. And in a time of war no government can afford to be complacent and blase about it all.

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

You'll have to share it with me.

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

Absolutely spot on. Karma sent.

Every time some stupid Yank says "If it wasn't for us, you'd be speaking German!" I feel like breaking his nose. :frown: Instead, I merely reply "No, it wasn't for the Russians, Poms would be speaking German".

The Yanks arrived late to the war (as usual), messed about in the Pacific for a while, committed two of history's worst war crimes (Huroshima/Nagasaki) and shared some of the mopping up operations in German-occupied territories. They did not save Europe from Nazi domination.

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

Incidentally, this thread is about the Americanisation of Australia - but nobody's posted any examples yet.

Nu-Shooz has referred to "the roads" (is there such a thing as an Americanised road?) and "the buildings (is there such a thing as an Americanised building?), while worzel has mentioned the size of the country and the heat (neither of which constitute Americanisation).

kiwi_child was predictably negative: "Coming from NZ, I couldn't believe how Americanised OZ was. It really took me by surprise". But again, she gave no examples.

In 2006, jadnrich once told me that Australia had changed so much that I wouldn't recognise it when I returned. I dismissed this as a load of cobblers, and I was right to do so. On arriving in Australia for a 3-week holiday in August last year, I was delighted to find (as I had expected) that almost nothing had changed. Certainly, I saw no more evidence of Americanisation than I had when I left home in January 2004.

Speaking for myself, I believe that Australian TV has become increasingly Americanised. That's my example.

Does anyone else have one - or more? :)

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

OK..

I do notice that Australia uses American spelling quite a lot. Center instead of centre for example. :D

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

Blatant materialistic attitudes, superficial thinking, pretentiousness, smugness and arrogance (OZ is simply the best place on planet earth. We're right and everyone else who differs from our mainstream thinking is unaustralian).

-The moral minority dictating what values are acceptable.
- A focus that fills our screens, airwaves, electronic and print media with US culture, fashion and trivial dribble and promotes this as journalism
-The rip your fellow citizens off culture
-Lack of empathy and compassion for the disadvantaged and govt policies that continue to marginalise them while at the same time branding them all lazy bludgers
- A society that is disengaged from itself and others and sees the economy and the dollar as God almighty and hides itself in the sand by allowing itself to be drowned in AFL and other sports to the point it's actually a religion
-A society that worships the car (and continues to plan infrastructure to serve the auto deity) and has a shocking to poor standard of public transport services
- The bigger is better mindset covering everything from sporting stadiums to fast food
-An unwillingness or inability to share of oneself beyond a superficial level. Very much a mask wearing society (worse than the US on this I think)
-Focussing on what car people drive, what burb they live in, what they do for a living, and using this info as some type of measuring stick instead of just focussing on what kind of person they are.
- People in the media making fun of peoples sexual identity or sexual orientation or labelling them as perverts or lepers of some sort. Laws and business practices that still discriminate agst these people. Only heterosexuals are normal in OZ you know! By contrast the UK is very gay, les and trans friendly, accepting that we are indeed a diverse people.
-Parents who wrap their kids up in cotton wool, eg, driving them to school for Godsake for paranoia about child predators.

I'm sure there are more but I can't think of them at the moment.

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

This isn't strictly true. The Empire was not cost effective long before WWII, and Britain was lucky not only to be lent the money in the first place but to owe money to a nation that was extremely relaxed when Britain couldn't pay it back in time. That the British blew all the Marshall aid money on setting up the NHS before it could afford to run it, while France and Germany used theirs to increase productivity is hardly the Americans' fault. Blame the Labour Party.

Americans lost over 400,000 soldiers in WWII, and Britain lost about 380,000. Because of thelarge US population, they lost a smaller overall percentage, but 400,000 men dying cannot be dismissed in the way you do.

Who is implying this? No nation acts out of altruism, any realist will tell you that. The US could not have a single, aggressive power dominating all of Europe, so it acted to stop this. Aren't the British lucky?

No more league tables! Millions of men and women died fighting against German expansionism! They all made a difference.

Thereis a pretty sound theory about the impact of large bodies of water and how they hinder the expansion of aggressive empires. I think the Japanese would have found it extremely difficult to invade inthe first place. The quantity of materiel needed for the invasion of an entire contient would be out of this world. Look at what was needed to get into northern France at the close of WWII. Holding the continent against its will would be even harder.

Re: Americanisation of Austrlia
 

Come on Vash, Truman's decision to drop the bombs wasn't a war crime at the time. It has become a war crime over time. It's not fair to judge yesterday's acts by today's cultural values. Nuclear weapons became a monster through the Cold War and not before. There *was* concern about their use at the time but back then there was nowhere near the stigma attached to them as there is now.

Also, the use of these weapons had several functions. First, they saved an invasion of the Japanese homeland which would have cost by most conservative estimates 500,000 men's lives. Second, they showed the Soviet Union that the US had this power and would use it, and third, they expedited the surrender of the Japanese before the Soviets could invade the north. If this had happened Japan today would be like the Korean peninsula with a buggered-up north and a democratic south.

It's OK for us to say it was a war crime, but I'm not sure the residents of Hokkaido would agree hadthey spent the last 60 years making soup out of their own sandals and being shot for their political opinions while those in the south played with their iPods.