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BobTheSubgenius

(12,089 posts)
5. Neither German nor Japanese POWs could fathom the wealth and largess of American.
Tue Sep 9, 2025, 01:18 PM
Tuesday

A German officer was quoted as saying that he knew the war was all over but the shouting shortly before they even landed, and the certainty of that only increased during his time in the US. Their captors were feeding them FAR better than their own military had been, and everything but everything was limitless, and the American civilian population wasn't suffering like either the German or Japanese were.

They were both aghast at how the material life of civilians was actually IMPROVING while America was in a wartime economy, and the production of wartime materiel was beyond phenomenal. For example, the aviation industry was turning out something like one bomber every hour, and there were a million and a half individual components needed to make one. By 1943, the output was 700 per day.

In Japan, ramen was invented to fill growling stomachs, and was contained 40 cellulose, just to make a consumer feel full. And yet, in the US, Coca Cola and ice cream were limitless.

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