Posted on 03/09/2015 12:38:33 PM PDT by C19fan
One of these days I’d like to take a look on the net and figure out exactly how much US military equipment, money etc. the Soviets were given.
I’ve always thought that without the massive Lend-Lease program Russia would not have survived the German invasion.
Just a thought and I’ve nothing to back it up. But hearing people state that the Russian’s won the war and the Western front was a sideshow is incorrect.
Stalin knew the Red army was not ready for war in 1939, hence the Nazi-Soviet Pact. His miscalculation was that he thought it would buy him time until 1942.
Whether you believe Viktor Suvorov or not is another question.
A few things that we do know and can verify: The Soviet War Plan from the 1920's onward never called for defensive war. This is a fact. The Soviet Geopolitical Plan for Europe envisioned Europe would become communist during and after a World War, just as World War I had made the Soviet Union itself possible. This is also a known fact. The Soviets regarded Germany as the main -- and eventual -- enemy long before the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. And even in the writings of pro-Soviet authors like William L Shirer, it's clear that Soviet moves in the early Spring of 1942 in the Baltics and other places which the Germans and Soviets had agreed would be part of Germany's sphere of influence were increasingly aggressive and alarming to the Germans. These moves are also firmly established history. They might have amounted to nothing more than Stalin -- the great opportunist -- taking what he could get while [he believed] Germany was spread too thin, or they might have been indicators of more aggressive intentions.
Given how much of World War II history we've allowed the Russians to falsify, I wouldn't necessarily dismiss claims about Nazi concerns of a Soviet invasion out of hand.
Correction: Spring 1941, obviously.
It wasn’t the equipment, it was the language. By the time the tank commander said complex, compound German words like ‘panzerkampfwagen’ the battle was over.
The Germans hurt themselves with these big tanks. Yes they could take a hit and strike back and kill but they were too wide and heavy for most of the roads and bridges in Europe. This greatly hampered their responding to changing battles.
Experts say after a couple of Tigers went down a road it became so full of rubble and potholes no other vehicles could precede .
Stalin was being courted by France and Britain as well as Germany in August 1939. Stalin thought the allies wanted sit back and do nothing, and defeat Hitler at the cost of copious amounts of Russian blood. Stalin wanted no part of this and cut his deal with Hitler. He thought the Germans, British and French would bleed themselves out again just like World War 1, and he’d clean up in Europe when it was done.
But he miscalculated. The French got KO’s in first round, threw in the towel and the Brits hid behind their moat. That left Stalin to face Hitler, alone, with an army he knew wasn’t ready for war, since he’d killed most of it’s officers and scared to death all the rest.
So the way it worked out was that the British sat it out, and defeated Hitler at the cost of copious amounts of Russian blood.
I love history’s ironies.
We gave the USSR a mountain of supplies, about to the same degree as we did England. But its actually true that WWII was the war between Germany and Russia, and the western front was a death blow. But the overwhelming, not even close, destruction of the German military occurred in the east.
Not efficiently in terms of Soviet losses, but that is indeed where the German military was destroyed. And the Luftwaffe was destroyed by daylight bombing. The greatest utility in the bombing was forcing the Luftwaffe to fight and to get destroyed.
But the numbers are that between 70 an 80% of the German army was destroyed in the east. That’s why an old German will still blanche at the mention of the eastern front. And they inflicted enormous losses too. BOth sides in the east lost about as many in individual battles there than we did in the entire war.
That was a general German problem, they had a tendency to want to pulverize everything, like in Stalingrad, which in the end made it even easier for the Russians to defend it.
Actually, the opening of the Soviet archives makes it unclear whether the invasion of the USSR was a mistake. Not doing it a month or two earlier, not providing winter supplies to the troops, splitting forces between the drive on Moscow and the drive on the Caucus oil fields, not falling back to regroup at Stalingrad, those were mistakes.
We now know that Stalin planned to abrogate the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by launching an attack along the Carpathian Mountains with specially trained mountain divisions, thereby cutting off the Reich from its only source of non-Soviet oil, but Hitler struck first. Had Hitler not invaded the USSR, the war would have been over very quickly, with Stalin dictating the terms, rather than Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt jointly.
Funny you should mention this. After the war ended, I spent almost a year in occupation in Austria. The Austrians I met were pretty reasonable but in 1945 they were a pretty beaten lot. But he may be right that the Russians were not able to attack the Germans in 1941. Later we furnished them with plenty of supplies which were more than enough to run over the Germans in 1945. Regards,
Good health to you.
It was well inside the Russian mentality that Moscow could be sacked by an enemy. Napoleon did it. But they don’t associate that with the nation collapsing. They would have simply moved east and fought on, like moving factories. So focusing on Moscow, etc would have not changed the outcome, unless of course, we stopped lend lease. (which could have happened had they collapsed)
Also, interestingly, Hitler never intended to take all of Russia. He was intending to go to about the Urals and never set foot in Siberia, believing nothing could ever be assembled there that would threaten him. Essentially he wanted the European half of the USSR.
Any large weapon like a tank has a potential fault which is field service. For all of their faults n armor and gun size the Sherman was dependable and very easy to service/repair in the field. The Tiger was the opposite and break downs took a long time to repair
The Germans were good at repairing factories and later, at dispersing and hiding them. Production never suffered that greatly from bombing. Their production was actually trending UP througout of the war.
There is some argument that bombing’s greatest contribution was the quantity of resources diverted to the Defense of the Reich.
Their real bottleneck was oil. They lost their eastern oilfields and had to depend on synthetic fuel - and those refineries were hard to hide.
And then there was the issue of trying to move that fuel.
So, even if the Germans built stuff, they had a hard time flying or driving it. A significant part of the Battle of the Bulge required the Germans to capture Allied fuel dumps so that they could keep going.
You are correct. Had he waited until 1946, Roosevelt would have been dead and he would have been the 1st wth a ballistic nuclear missile. The war in Europe would have been over b4 it ever began. New York, London, Paris, and Moscow would have been a nuclear wasteland.
Not the old Volkswagens. They were very simple easy to fix very reliable. My friends and I swapped an engine in a 1967 Volkswagen with just hand tools and jack stands Took a summer afternoon
In some areas. Mismanagement and micromanagement hindered their efforts as well. The destruction of the Luftwaffe rested first on the backs of the heavy bombers. When they finally received capable escorts the carnage increased but the draw was always the bombers. The Luftwaffe's destruction prior to DDay made the gains in western Europe possible.
Never heard of that one, but Googled... Holy CRAP!
At least it was a 911... I sunk money in a 914... now there’s a return on investment.
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