Posted on 06/10/2015 8:11:38 AM PDT by Pan_Yan
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First, the history. Although by 1944 the war’s outcome was never in doubt, if all efforts failed the Soviet Army would eventually have crushed the Reich by itself. Victory at that point was a national and industrial effort, and would belong to the countries with the most steel plants and masses of citizens under arms.
Midway was different. It was not a national effort but instead a battle of individuals, a rickety shootout by a few highly trained people under extremely confused conditions, and — incredibly — the underdog won. There’s no reason the United States, with a second-string commander, green troops and two-and-a-half aircraft carriers, should have been able to defeat the Japanese with their four carriers and the most experienced planes, pilots and admirals in the world.
Had Japan annihilated the rest of the Pacific Fleet carriers, it would have taken Midway. With land-based planes on Midway, it would have taken Hawaii. With Hawaii…well, who knows? Maybe San Francisco, maybe Alaska. Maybe pause in the Pacific and knock out the British in India. And then maybe peace, under a new Pax Japania.
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In the long run, the Battle of Midway and other boldface WWII names like D-Day and the Bulge have perhaps warped America’s national memory of conflict. War in the public consciousness — the right wars, anyway — became a mostly clean duel of professionals, what we are pleased to call the “American way of war,” rather than the extended contests of national will and resources they more accurately resemble.
World War II erased every memory of the groaning exertion of the Civil War, which was something similar to what the Soviets were fighting against the Nazis.
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And had allied supplies not been rolling in to help supply the red army the outcome would also have been very different.
Marshall Zhukov had already slapped around that million man Kwantung Army at Nomonhan in August of 1939. Japan wanted no more of the Soviets ever after. As for the Japanese marching on Moscow, an over 3,000 mile trek, it could never happen successfully. The Japanese Army in Southeast Asia virtually starved to death by the end of the war, how would they have supplied their forces with enough resources to go on fighting. The infrastructure of Siberia was not up to snuff to allow it, and Japan did not have the industrial capacity at the time to build one in a timely fashion.
Interesting story in Anthony Beevor’s “World War II”. An ethnic Korean soldier in the Chinese Army or local Manchurian militia is captured by the Japanese in their conquest of Manchuria in 1931. The guy is then dragooned into the local puppet government’s, Manchukuo, forces and then captured by the Soviets in a border skirmish. The Soviets let him out of the POW camp when he enlists in the Red Army. He is captured by the Germans in the winter of 41-42 outside of Moscow. The Germans draft him into their own forces, and the Korean guy ends up on the beaches of Normandy where he ends the war as a prisoner of the US Army.
Yang Kyoungjong
Hence the effectiveness of the penal battalions.
If I desert, a commissar executes me.
If I surrender, a TKSS executes me.
If I fight and get captured, the same thing will happen, so I will fight to the death.
If I fight to the death, I may just survive and get out of the penal battalion and its short rations.
The eastern front wasn’t 90% of the European theatre, thats a lot of soviet propaganda about their part in the war. They also like to whitewash how much help through supplies and equipment they had in achieving even that.
The soviets sole claim to do so much is that so many off the soviets died, mainly because they had poor leadership and were very short on equipment, especially in the beginning years.
I highly doubt the soviets would have been able to resist the Germans without allied support. Most likely they would have tried to sue for peace and pull out early like ww1 if they didn’t collapse beforehand.
The western allies killed or captured over 2.5 million more Germans on the western front, then the soviets on the eastern front over the course of the war. Before the final push towards germany, about 30-40% of German casualties were inflicted by western front allies.
All of this while fighting in Africa the Mediterranean, and the pacific theatre.
Their casualties were also far higher than they needed to be, due to incompetence.
But after 1942, the Germans missed their window - even victory in the West would not have salvaged the Eastern front.
And of course more Germans were captured in the West: would you rather surrender to Churchill or Stalin?
95% of the deuce and a half or larger trucks supplied under lend lease to the Soviet Union were built by Studebaker. GM also shipped about 10,000 trucks to the Reds.
Ford Motor Company produced trucks wound up primarily on the Burma Road, or on duty in the United states. Ford did of course build 280,000 jeeps, 12,200 armored cars, 1690 Sherman tanks, 1035 tank destroyers and 6,790 B-24 bombers
Actually the trucks built in the Soviet Union were built at the automobile factory in Gorky. That facility was built by none other than Henry Ford.
Also the South had s superiority in cavalry. What they lacked a navy, and Union artillery was superior to that of the Southern armies.
World War III will be as different as World War II was to World War I—it will be fought in Space.
I think it will be fought in cyber space and the streets.
I have found in my readings that the Spring of 1942 was very sobering for the average Russian soldier. The summer before, entire armies had surrendered, hundreds of thousands of men.
In the Spring a few escaped POWs had brought back the word that they had been kept in open pins during the winter and that they were all dead.
Resistance stiffened.
Great story. Completely untrue. Richard Sorge was the Soviet spy, operating as a German journalist in Tokyo. He sent the information that the Japanese would not attack the USSR, as well as information tipping Stalin of the impending German invasion. He was arrested by the Japanese in late 1941 and confessed under torture. The Japanese offered to trade him to Russia for one of their spies, but Stalin refused, perhaps embarrassed that Sorge's warnings were ignored. The Japanese hanged him in 1944.
The excellent Korean movie “My Way” (2011) is based on this story. I think it’s still on Netflix.
I always thought Midway was God’s way of saying to the Japs that the party was over, and they lost.
But that was Hitler stupidity from the get go. Was never gonna happen. Hitler greatly under estimated the resolve of both the Soviet Union and the USA. And Britain for that matter too.
Ahh. Yes. I stand corrected. Did the Soviets tell Stalin they should save him and Stalin refused saying Gratitude was a disease for the dogs?
What we are both saying is that without the industrial modernization provided by American industrialists, the Soviet Union might have been defeated.
Digging around, he appears to have said it in 1924, in relation to two politburo officials who had backed him when he was consolidating power and whom he later had shot.
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