[colorado tanker]

Very nice piece by Baldwin on Russian attitudes toward the Brits and US. They were so paranoid about Westerners contaminating their people's thoughts that the Brits actually considered pulling their people out and ending the Murmansk run. No question we could have helped them on the Eastern Front had they allowed us to put strategic air force units there.

I think Hansen is spot on. The Russians just couldn't appreciate that the Brits had to fight it out in North Africa to avoid the Germans taking Cairo and Suez and overrunning the Middle East. They also didn't appreciate the immense effort for the U.S. to train an Army from scratch and then transport it and logistically support it across an ocean. Plus, we sent a lot of equipment we could have used ourselves to the Russians.

And quite frankly had we not gone to North Africa and attempted a cross-Channel invasion in 1943 I think we would have had our butts handed to us. The Red Army wasn't very effective against the Germans until they had been blooded and we needed that experience in North Africa and Sicily. Plus, we wouldn't have had enough strength or equipment to do the job right.

[Homer_J_Simpson]

Very nice piece by Baldwin on Russian attitudes toward the Brits and US.

Part I, in yesterday's post, is also interesting. In it he discusses the Sov's murky relationship with Japan.

[henkster]

While we plead that we have to create an army from scratch, which means it has to be trained and organized, the Soviet Union had to create armies from scratch...many times. This was SOP in 1941 and much of 1942. Even now, in “liberated” Ukrainian villages, all the males between the ages of 15 to 45 are being rounded up, given some scrap of uniform, a weapon, some basic training of a few hours or days, and fed into the meatgrinder. The casualties they are taking this summer are staggering, and the Red Army has an insatiable appetite for more soldiers to keep units on the battlefield. The practice of feeding in these poorly trained men has predictable and tragic results.

In 1941, the Germans didn’t give them the time they needed to create a trained army. Instead, the Soviets had to trade space and buy time with the blood of their soldiers. It made the Red Army a club, not a rapier. It was a crude instrument that in the operational and tactical sense, had to bludgeon the Germans into submission. And it was a club by necessity, not by choice. Now that they have that club, Generals like Zhukhov, Konev, Vatutin and Rokossovsky are swinging it with a vengeance.

They can’t understand why we didn’t do the same. Well, the reason we didn’t is because we simply didn’t have to. The Soviets did.