Posted on 06/11/2019 6:48:02 AM PDT by C19fan
Vehicles (trucks, jeeps, etc.): 7,000
RR cars & locomotives: 13,000
Operation Torch didn’t happen until November 1942, by which time we already knew the Nazi armed forces had been broken by the USSR on the Eastern front.
Aside from need the ports in southern France, where could those forces have been better deployed?
Italy is mountainous and easy to defend even against vastly superior forces. Would pouring more troops into Italy have made any real difference,
The balkans? Supporting it would have been a logistical nightmare. Secondly, what would we have gained? Yugoslavia is mountainous and thus not easily passable. What’s the big prize to be gained? Greece? The Brits got that anyway. Bulgaria? Yugoslavia went nonaligned under Tito anyway. We were not going to be able to sweep through the Balkans, up the Hungarian plain and into Poland ahead of the Soviets. That’s a pipe dream. Much as I admire Churchill, I don’t think he was being very realistic here.
Lend lease and bombing of German industry would have done exactly squat without 20 million Soviets ready to stop the largest land invasion in history.
It seems that some people here are absolutely desperate to deny the USSR the credit properly due for its defeat of Germany.
If we were to divide the credit for defeating the Nazis into 100 parts, at least 70 of those parts would belong to the USSR.
“Lots of people died on the eastern front. But Russia would not have won on its own, any more than we would have won alone.”
If we hadn’t invaded, how long after we dropped the atomic bombs on Japan would it have taken Germany to surrender? Do you think we would have had to drop one or two in Germany?
Based on postwar Germany vs. postwar Japan, it was probably a mistake not to have nuked Berlin first.
Ike caught the brunt of this debacle but it was Roosevelt who insisted that Churchill wanted to prolong the war by liberating Italy and moving up Eastern Europe liberating everything from Germany and subsequently Russia. The influence of Communism in the US pushed Roosevelt to end America’s involvement to allow Stalin to hold Eastern Europe. Churchill was absolutely correct about this. It was antiwar sentiment in the US that allowed Russia to dominate Eastern Europe for the next 40 years and foment the cold war.
The Soviets had not eve reached Warsaw by the time we landed in Normandy, unless you consider Normandy not part of the Continent. Warsaw fell in 45. Although they could have earlier, but they wanted the Nazis to crush the Polish uprising so any resistance to the Soviets takeover would be gone.
Bingo. This is the key factor. It’s not so much that we have stuff away at Yalta as those were the facts on the ground at that point.
Wanna keep the Soviets out of Central Europe? Want to keep them from stripping it bare for labor and resources which enhanced their strength for decades? Don’t give them all those trucks and keeps and locomotives. It’s really that simple. The logistics backbone we gave them enabled them to project power more than a short distance from their supply bases - the problem the Germans never cracked.
Read the the Stalin quote again, he may understand something about war in the Industrial Age that you apparent refuse to accept.
“First Western landing in Europe was in September 1943.”
Russia faced 60% of the German Army. Not 100%. And meanwhile, the west bombed Germany. It was not decisive in itself, but it caused massive destruction, death, hardship and tied up enormous resources.
The Eastern front saw a lot of men die compared to the west. That was because the Soviets didn’t mind killing their people, and the Germans knew surrender meant death. But logistics often wins or loses war, and our logistical efforts, and what we did to hamper German ones, were at least as important as how many Russians died.
“Extrapolating from available statistics, researchers estimate that British-supplied tanks made up 30 to 40 percent of the entire heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces before Moscow at the beginning of December 1941, and certainly made up a significant proportion of tanks available as reinforcements at this critical point in the fighting.”
“A total of 22,800 armoured vehicles were delivered to the Red Army during World War II, of which 1,981 were lost in dangerous Arctic convoys. These deliveries represented about 20 percent of the total number of armoured vehicles produced by Russia during the war. Specifically, this was 16 per cent of Russian main battle tanks, 12 per cent of Russian self-propelled gun carriages and tank destroyers, and 100 per cent of Russian infantry fighting vehicles, as Russia did not manufacture any armoured infantry fighting vehicles during the Second World War....
...Of much more decisive importance for Russian warfare, however, were the deliveries of motor vehicles, especially from the United States. During the Second World War, Russia built only 343,624 cars and trucks, since the major automobile manufacturers, such as the GAZ factories, were used to manufacture armoured combat vehicles. The USA alone supplied the Russians with 501,660 tactical wheeled and tracked vehicles, including 77,972 Jeeps, 151,053 1.5 t trucks and 200,622 2.5 t trucks.”
https://ww2-weapons.com/lend-lease-tanks-and-aircrafts/
“Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can’t be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn’t have been able to form our reserves and continue the war,” Soviet General Georgy Zhukov said after the end of WWII.
“We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with....
...The USSR received a total of 44,000 American jeeps, 375,883 cargo trucks, 8,071 tractors and 12,700 tanks. Additionally, 1,541,590 blankets, 331,066 liters of alcohol, 15,417,000 pairs of army boots, 106,893 tons of cotton, 2,670,000 tons of petroleum products and 4,478,000 tons of food supplies made their way into the Soviet Union.”
“Food comprised almost five million out of the 18 million tons of goods that the USSR received from the Allies. Especially popular among soldiers and civilians during the war was canned meat...The volume of canned meat received from America exceeded the amount produced in the Soviet Union sixfold.”
https://www.rbth.com/history/328243-us-and-uk-firepower-lendlease
Wars are not won by generals. They are won by logistics.
*** But I think the memory of it will live on longer in Russia than here. ***
The latest version of Victory Day Parade is available on YOUTUBE.
Appears Moscow invites the Militaries from their previous slave-Republics to
march.
Pretty impressive and colorful as the uniforms are colorful and sometimes
gaudy.
All the marchers have proud facial demeanors and the military manner is
different and interesting.
About an hour 15 and you can jump ahead of Putin’s 20 speech.
I think the Soviets would have bled out first. They ran a war that was very high cost in terms of lives. By the end of the war they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of manpower. They could not have replenished further losses.
Get a map.
Warsaw is 80% of the distance between the extent of the German advance and the German border.
Seriously I strongly encourage people to go through a month-by-month review of where forces were during WW2. It should really open some eyes about the reality of that war.
Hence our defeats at Yalta to Stalin. And, later, to the Red Chinese communists. GET and Truman’s State Dept and future DOD and White House was staffed with very influential communists at many levels. Including FDR vice president .
I don’t know that Stalin wanted a high death toll, I think he just didn’t care. He killed millions in Ukraine before the war without a second thought. His elimination of the officer corps, before the war started didn’t help things either.
Had Russia been blessed with a better leader, Hitler might not have tried to invade.
Avalon Hill used to make war board games that took days to play. One was ‘Stalingrad’ which basically recreated the invasion of Russia. It was virtually impossible for the German side to win. Russia in Europe is shaped like a funnel. If you are invading from Europe, the farther you go in, the longer the front line becomes and of course, the longer your supply lines are. Russians can give up 1000 miles and still have 4000 miles behind them. I never really appreciated the geographic advantage until I played the game.
Russia fought on one front.
Germany and the USA fought on two fronts.
The British arguably fought on three fronts.
In terms of manpower, yes. In terms of resources, no. The airplane was decisive by WWII. The side that had air superiority never lost. That held true in the Pacific as well as in Europe. About 75-80% of Luftwaffe resources were drawn off of the campaign in the east to try to fend off the Anglo-American bombing campaign - to say nothing of the many thousands of Flak 88s or the damage done to German Infrastructure and production.
Then there is the massive lend lease aid. Early on, the amount of telecommunications equipment Britain gave the Soviets was staggering. They had literally no been able to communicate with a lot of units in the field before that. Their strategic metal reserve was in Kiev. That fell to the Nazis. The Allies made good on that loss. Their breadbasket, Ukraine fell to the Nazis. The Allies made good on that loss (or nearly so). 100% of their refining capacity for high octane aviation fuel was knocked out early on. The Allies made good on that loss. They had no bauxite to make aluminum - thus no aircraft. The Allies supplies them with lots of aluminum.
The Nazis landed several staggering blows on them but every time they did, the Allies would come along and negate it.
That was one of the stupidest comments I’ve ever seen in over 20 years on FR.
Please do not respond to me on any topic ever again. There is a minimum IQ for interacting with me and you are well below the threshold
Not even the Soviets know how many men they lost at Stalingrad.
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