Talk politics.

Actually, that helped the USSR and the Union win the Great Patriotic War and the US Civil War, respectively. Hitler's whole agenda for invading had been the theft of Soviet resources, which the USSR quite effectively denied him. And from a purely pragmatic rationale, there's no reason to torch places like the Shenandoah Valley, one of the breadbaskets of the pre-Civil War South. All the same, without Sherman and Sheridan the war would have creeped on still longer.