I don't know. I think there was a war of note which might have been around the 1940s?
Nitpicking your nitpick:
Contrary to the American tendency to act like we singlehandedly won WW2, we were a latecomer to the war and not a central power prior to that war. There were many countries involved in it.
It's possible that the US played a critical role in Japan's surrender. It's also possible they would have surrendered anyway, we just have no means to go back in time, run the scenario twice and see how it would go without the US.
In the United States, generations were taught that Japan would never have surrendered so quickly without use of the atomic bomb and that victory would have required a bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland, costing hundreds of thousands of lives.
Japanese students were generally taught a very different narrative: that Japan already had been defeated and dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki three days apart was a geopolitical calculation to keep the Soviet Union at bay.
Nitpicking your nitpick:
Contrary to the American tendency to act like we singlehandedly won WW2, we were a latecomer to the war and not a central power prior to that war. There were many countries involved in it.
It's possible that the US played a critical role in Japan's surrender. It's also possible they would have surrendered anyway, we just have no means to go back in time, run the scenario twice and see how it would go without the US.
In the United States, generations were taught that Japan would never have surrendered so quickly without use of the atomic bomb and that victory would have required a bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland, costing hundreds of thousands of lives.
Japanese students were generally taught a very different narrative: that Japan already had been defeated and dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki three days apart was a geopolitical calculation to keep the Soviet Union at bay.
https://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/world-war-ii-th...