Posted on 05/13/2019 7:53:33 PM PDT by marshmallow
Give or take a few. Who cares?
The Poles are super pissed off that we tossed then to the Soviets.
Actually, I don’t blame them ONE bit..
IIRC, Stalin’s son was captured by the Germans, and Stalin threw his DIL in jail.
Yeah, you have to wonder if they’d have kept jumping into the meat grinder without Stalin threatening to shoot them if they didn’t.
“The Allies could have waltzed in there at a fraction of the cost, but the Russians insisted on taking the city themselves.”
The Russians didn’t insist on it, in fact the russian people had no say in the decision whatsoever. The only person whose decision mattered wasn’t even Russian at all — Stalin
My understanding of the early days of Barbarossa was that Stalin retreated to his apartments in a deep depression on hearing of Germany’s invasion.
He basically left Russia leaderless because everyone was afraid to act without Stalin’s permission.
No Germans were aryans. And nice of you to call 6 million jes they murdered park of THEIR losses. And at the end of the war, Russians were standing in Berlin.
Pretty sick to put down nazi propaganda as fact.
For all the BS, after Barbarossa was fought to a stop, the Russians outfought, had better tactics, and launched a very hard army at the nazis....and kicked their asses.
The Russians lost hard? Hard to make your nazi case when they they were standing in Berlin at the end of the war.
And Hitler wasn't even German.
The only ‘’tactics’’ the Russians had was en masse. Infantry, armor and artillery.
It seemed though the the Germans pretty much were surrendering in droves to the Western Allies, and many would have done anything to escape the wrath of the Russians.
Basically we could have told the Germans, “You can surrender to us, or to the Russians, your choice.”
The shit some freepers say on FR, really.
He got there just as the Battle of the Bulge was beginning. After the battle they came across a quiet village with no Nazi's (or so they thought). He was in recon, so out in front of the main force. He went into a tavern by himself to check it out. There were like 6 Nazi's in there eating. He put his rifle on them and they surrendered. I think they were pretty young.
He brings them outside to his small group (three jeeps iirc) and they all agree that they can't take them prisoner. So they got a white sheet, put it on a stick, and told them to keep marching back down the road and surrender to the larger army coming their way!
At the very end of his story he talks about a large group of actual S.S. soldiers finally surrendering. (I think it was more than just his squad though that got them). The S.S. would not just hand over their guns, but the Americans were allowed to take the guns and other stuff from the S.S. guys one at a time. He said it took two days to disarm them!
That was at the very end of the war. I had read another article about how the last shots of the war were sort of on accident when a plane fired it's guns on a bunch of captured German troops.
My relative didn't have that in his account, but I wonder....
That was very accurate early in the war through late 42. But after a year or so, that reality had changed. And by the time they were pushing the nazis back into Berlin, they were a very different army.
Nazi propaganda pushed a lot of odd things late in the war and you still hear them today. But they were basically intended to explain how poorly the Germans were performing in the last year of the war. The line was that they were always superior, but their heroic struggle was doomed by sheer numbers.
But the fact is they got their asses waxed by superior combined arms tactics and weaponry late in the war. The Il-2 hurt the krauts, and the T-34 did as well, but artillery was what destroyed the nazi army. And the red army learned to mass it very effectively and the krauts never successfully dealt with it. And it helped that we kept them -very- well supplied with ammo.
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