FINNS ON OFFENSIVE, RAID ENEMY BASES (12/6/39)

Microfiche-New York Times archives, McHenry Library, U.C. Santa Cruz | 12/6/39

[Homer_J_Simpson]

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EDITORIALS

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[Homer_J_Simpson]

Free Republic University, Department of History presents World War II Plus 70 Years: Seminar and Discussion Forum
First session: September 1, 2009. Last date to add: September 2, 2015.
Reading assignment: New York Times articles delivered daily to students on the 70th anniversary of original publication date. (Previously posted articles can be found by searching on keyword “realtime”.)
To add this class to or drop it from your schedule notify Admissions and Records (Attn: Homer_J_Simpson) by freepmail. Those on the Realtime +/- 70 Years ping list are automatically enrolled. Course description, prerequisites and tuition information is available at the bottom of Homer’s profile.

[Homer_J_Simpson]

[Homer_J_Simpson]

Air Fields Bombed – 2-4
The International Situation – 3
Submarine Sinks British Coast Ship – 5
U-Boats Go Into Mass Production As Nazis Strain to Increase Them – 6
Colombia Prepares For Rule By Decree – 7
Incidents in European Conflict – 7
The Littlest Victim (Editorials) – 9-10

[samtheman]

Fighting against Roosevelt’s Beloved Stalin.

[ScottinVA]

The Finns put up a respectable fight against the Soviets. They employed an “ski-by” shootings as a tool of guerrilla warfare. Silent and deadly!

[ichabod1]

Thanks.

[GL of Sector 2814]

Many of the Finns were armed with one of the best submachineguns of WW2, the KP-31 Suomi. There's a company now making a semi-auto version; I'm toying with the idea of making it my next acquisition, the price is quite reasonable.

[Cacique]

btt

[abb]

http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1939/dec39/f06dec39.htm

Independence Day in Finland
Wednesday, December 6, 1939 www.onwar.com

In Finland... Independence Day is celebrated. Some 50 aircraft arrive from Italy.

In Helsinki... President Kallio receives a message of sympathy from American President Roosevelt.

The Winter War... Soviet forces complete a series of landings on seven islands in the Gulf of Finland. There are heavy Soviet attacks on the Mannerheim Line defenses.
In Germany... SS forces kill the inmates of Stralsund and Chelm mental asylums.

In Berlin... A note is issued to the Foreign Press in which neutral countries, especially Holland, are condemned for a lack of resistance to the British blockade.

In the Hague... A semi-official protest of the German note is registered.

In Britain... During the night, German seaplanes and destroyers lay mines off the eastern coast. The British destroyer HMS Jersey is engaged and torpedoed by German destroyers during the operations.

[beebuster2000]

btt

[HiramQuick]

A friend of mine is an armorer for sig .. and a collector. He acquired a KP-31 ten years ago that had never been fired. His is not totally Finnish .. evidently in the 1930’s Birmingham Small Arms manufactured many of the barrels for the Finnish company that I cannot remember or pronounce their name.

According to my friend it was and still is the most accuatate sub machine gun built. Unlike the infamous UZI’s of our day, ther are no stamped steel and spot welded parts. Everything including the breech was machined steel.

Recoil was controlled by not putting the butt to the shoulder but allowing the fore thumnb on the forestock to carry the recoil while the butt of the gun was pulled in tightly to the chest. It allowed for a recoil to be absorbed in a straight axis, relative to the shooter, which accounted for its accuracy.

I was amazed at the simplicity of the gun .. simple to strip down and field clean .... I would love to have one myself.

Oh .. and the Finn’s ... they were a force to be reckoned with. We have drive by shooters .. they had “ski by shooters” that drove the USSR nuts and kept the fear level high amongst the soviet troops. Nobody wnate to be stationed in that region.

[Harold Shea]

I remember reading I believe that a Ruskie General said that
we captured about enough ground to bury our dead.

[BroJoeK]

"Fighting against Roosevelt’s Beloved Stalin."

I've seen nothing suggesting direct contact between Roosevelt and Stalin at this point in the war. As of late 1939, Roosevelt is just trying to keep the US officially neutral, while at the same time doing everything he can to help out the Brits & French.

In two years it will be a much different story. By then Hitler had turned on his ally Stalin, and Roosevelt knew the only way to win the war without many millions of US casualties was to help Stalin defeat Hitler's armies in the east.

It turned out to be a pretty simple equation: approximately five Soviet soldiers killed for every two German soldiers, which saved the life of one US & British soldier. Around 70% of all German soldiers killed died fighting the Soviets.

So what Roosevelt Beloved was not Stalin, but the lives of young American "boys." Thank God.

[samtheman]

I've seen nothing suggesting direct contact between Roosevelt and Stalin at this point in the war. As of late 1939, Roosevelt is just trying to keep the US officially neutral, while at the same time doing everything he can to help out the Brits & French.

In two years it will be a much different story. By then Hitler had turned on his ally Stalin, and Roosevelt knew the only way to win the war without many millions of US casualties was to help Stalin defeat Hitler's armies in the east.

It turned out to be a pretty simple equation: approximately five Soviet soldiers killed for every two German soldiers, which saved the life of one US & British soldier. Around 70% of all German soldiers killed died fighting the Soviets.

So what Roosevelt Beloved was not Stalin, but the lives of young American "boys." Thank God.

Really?

Is that the way you really see it?

Here's a site chosen at random: THE FORGIVEN HOLOCAUST. There are thousands on this subject.

Here's a few excerpts from that site:

Soon after taking office in 1933, Roosevelt extended diplomatic recognition and international legitimacy to a regime that had already committed mass murder on a scale Hitler himself would never match.

Soviet communism eventually killed tens of millions of people - nearly 62 million, according to Professor R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii, a specialist in the study of "democide" (his term for government mass murder). In 1933 its record was already so bloody that Central Europe was terrified of the communist threat that so many Westerner intellectuals preferred to see as the Great Progressive Hope.

The communist-forced famine of Ukraine is sometimes called "the Forgotten Holocaust." A better name would be the Forgiven Holocaust.

Anyone who had provided as much aid and comfort to Hitler as Roosevelt gave Stalin would now be in total disgrace. Even those who opposed war with Hitler are tainted today. But we venerate the man who gave the murderous Stalin crucial acceptance, material aid and a benign image as "Uncle Joe."

Roosevelt's ambassador to the Soviet Union during the 1930s, Joseph Davies, became a great enthusiast of Stalin. His memoir "Mission to Moscow" glorified the Soviet regime and even defended the purges and show trials of the period. Roosevelt prevailed upon Warner Brothers to turn the book into a major motion picture (starring the great Walter Huston as Davies), in which Stalin was shown as a gentle, grandfatherly figure who had only the welfare of the Russian people at heart.

Do you not know of these things? Do you not believe them?

In 1939... and long before 1939... Stalin was a "Socialist Hero" to every "Progressive" in America. You don't think Roosevelt was one of those "Progressives"? You think he was completely untainted by all his "progressive" associations?

Yes, it's true what you write that by the mid-40's the military calculus of battle and casualties was such that it would have been insane for us not to have been allied with the Soviet Union.

But 1939 was not the mid-40s. In 1939 the Soviet Union was as much on the march as Hitler. But Stalin had something Hitler never had: the undying love and devotion of all true American Liberals, the Dear Leader of them all being, of course, FDR.

[CougarGA7]

Day 7 of the Winter War, December 6, 1939

Eastern Isthmus: fighting begins at Taipale.
Photo: SA-KUVA

A Soviet division launches an attack across the River Taipaleenjoki

• Helsinki: Foreign Minister Väinö Tanner hosts an Independence Day reception for the diplomatic corps in the banqueting hall of the Kämp Hotel.

• Kiviniemi: the last part of the covering force in front of the main defensive position on the Isthmus pulls back to the north of Vuoksi.The work of the covering force comes to an end.

• Eastern Isthmus: fighting begins at Taipale. A Soviet division launches an attack across the River Taipaleenjoki.

• By nightfall a Russian battalion has crossed River Taipaleenjoki at Koukkuniemi.

• Ladoga Karelia: General Headquarters forms Group Talvela to cover the Tolvajärvi-Ägläjärvi sector.

• Sweden: 80 leading public figures call on the country to help Finland.

[BroJoeK]

"Do you not know of these things? Do you not believe them?"

Don't be ridiculous. I've used Professor Rummel's site as a reference for going on ten years now. You are not telling me anything new.

I'll say again: in 1939 Hitler and Stalin were allies, and the US officially neutral -- while Roosevelt did everything he could to help out Britain & France.
In those years, Roosevelt made personal friends with Winston Churchill, but there was then no direct contact I know of between FDR and Stalin.

In 1941, having defeated nearly all of western Europe and threatened Britain with invasion, Hitler next turned on his own ally Stalin, and did invade the Soviet Union.
Roosevelt immediately came to Stalin's aid, for perfectly obvious strategic reasons.

So, "undying love and devotion" had little or nothing to do with it. The simple fact was: Hitler could not be defeated without Stalin's full participation.
Naturally, Roosevelt treated Stalin with the same charming personality that he had used over a lifetime, and for which he was elected the American President.

Of course, Nazis have always insisted that FDR should have joined forces with Germany to defeat Stalin.
But that was not ever even a remote possibility -- it's a fantasy on the same order of magnitude as the Nazis' racial ideology.

[samtheman]

Ok, I’m not telling you anything new. And I already agreed with you that of course it was strategically correct to ally with Stalin against Hitler in order to win the war as quickly as possible with the loss of as few American soldiers as possible.

However, I stand by what I said: Stalin held a special place in the hearts of all “progressives” in America and the West in the 1930’s and Roosevelt was most definitely one of those progressives.

He was, in fact, Prog One.

[BroJoeK]

"Stalin held a special place in the hearts of all “progressives” in America and the West in the 1930’s and Roosevelt was most definitely one of those progressives."

Perhaps. But consider: Roosevelt was extremely well informed about the Nazi persecutions of Jews before the war, about Nazi intentions toward Jews when war came, and even about the Holocaust as it unfolded.

I mention all this because it's not clear to me that FDR knew anything about Stalin's brutal persecutions & murders of millions of Soviet citizens. So, did Roosevelt turn a deliberate blind-eye toward Stalin, or did he seriously not understand how evil the Soviet dictator was? I don't know the answer.

But I can say this much: can you imagine the strong feelings of hatred that Nazis directed towards the Jews? Well, take that sense of hatred, cut it back by maybe one-third, and I contend, that is the hatred Franklin Roosevelt felt -- not just towards Nazis, but towards Germans in general! In short, FDR was almost as antil-German as the Nazis were anti-Jewish.

I could cite several examples, but possibly this will serve the purpose: at the time of Hitler's "Watch on the Rhine" offensive (aka: Battle of the Bulge), Roosevelt would have ordered dropping the Atom bomb on Germany, had it been available.

My point is: it's not clear just how much FDR may or may not have genuinely admired "Uncle Joe" Stalin. But there should be no mistaking the fact that Roosevelt absolutely feared and loathed Nazi Germans.

[samtheman]

What did Roosevelt do to open up the immigration process for European Jews in the 1930s?

[BroJoeK]

"What did Roosevelt do to open up the immigration process for European Jews in the 1930s?"

Answer: as much as he legally could -- to the point where well over half of all emmigrants allowed by law were Jewish refugees.

Furthermore, FDR helped find homes in other countries for Jews -- to the point where by the time Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, 72% of all German Jews and even 68% or Austrian Jews had escaped their countries. Sadly, many did not run far enough, and were later captured and "transported to the East," never to be seen again...

Now, if you are truly interested in this question, then I highly recommend:

Robert Rosen c2006 "Saving the Jews -- Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust"