Posted on 06/26/2019 8:19:05 AM PDT by gasport
Ping
was just positing on it would be good to have him on one’s side... seems a capable leader... i wasn’t talking loyalties... he didn’t lose to the american side. did you read the article? you read many things into which you shouldn’t... that is foolish.
Jack D. Ripper.
“Germany’s weapons production and military deployments increased during US/UK bombing.”
How much longer would the war in the East have lasted if there were no bombing raids, and upwards of 1 million men weren’t needed for air defense in the West and the associated production of aircraft and AA guns and shells?
Yes, the Red Army definitely took and inflicted the greatest number of casualties from and on the Wehrmacht...but that didn’t occur in a vacuum.
WRT Japan, the straw that broke the camel’s back was the atomic weapons...and the deployment of massive Red Army forces opposite the Japanese Army in Manchuria. In fact, the Soviets initiated a massive attack in Manchuria in between the 2 atomic bombings, killing any Japanese hopes of Soviet neutrality. One could argue that the real reason that the Japanese surrendered at the time they did was because of the Soviet action (and, btw, the Red Army effectively destroyed the entire Japanese Army in Manchuria in 3 weeks. In open field warfare, the Japanese were nowhere near a match for the Germans.
WRT Iran - yes, if their nation were united, and the only way to defeat them was to occupy Teheran like the Russians occupied Berlin, then we would have massive casualties (and, for this reason, such would likely never occur unless they nuked one or more of our cities). However, if we had (or bought) a clue, we wouldn’t play to THEIR strength, but instead to ours. First you wipe out their navy and air force - its done within 3 days to a week. You poke out their eyes with cruise missiles. Now you can do what you want, when you want to. You blockade the Persian Gulf, shutting down their economy (we can afford to pay more for oil, they cannot afford to sell none). Destroy their refining capacity with a few dozen cruise missiles. Pick a particular division of theirs and absolutely pulverize it with a massive bombing mission in one evening. Shut down their electrical generating capacity with a few dozen cruise missiles. Bomb critical bridges, railyards and ports. These are just examples, there are more things that we can do without landing a single pair of boots on the ground.
Fellow WW2 student. Please see my #44 and see if you agree.
I’m surprised it even got reported.
More typical was the military exercise Admiral Yamamoto
carried out before attacking the US at Midway. The
exercise resulted in Japan losing. So Yamamoto changed the
rules of the game until Japan won.
” Military history of “gaming” is replete with stories of people who went outside the established “rules”.”
Patton in the pre-WWII war games in Louisiana is a good example.
Well, I should have read the entire article before posting.
The military did, indeed, pull a CYA.
” Van Riper walked out when he realized his commands were being ignored by the exercise planners. The fix was in.
The three-star wrote a 21-page critique of the exercise that was immediately classified. Van Riper spoke out against the rigged game anyway. “
Any war demands that there is a will to fight—and I don’t think the will exists to fight anyone. How many will support “Trump’s War”? Besides Iran will pull in others into the fighting—North Korea? Cuba? China? THey will hit USA hard and know out power. Computers go out and the Weak livered geneation will squeal for peace and their internet.
You pull the German defenses against the Allied Air offensive and redeploy all those to the Eastern Front and it's a different ballgame.
The extra planes would have been invaluable at Kursk.
IT is true German production did peak in 44, but what would it have been without the Allied bombing campaign?
Take away our Lend Lease from the USSR, especially the trucks and canned food, and it is not likely the USSR is able to maneuver as well as they did.
Lots of moving parts in this one.
The US Military failed to learn any lessons from WW2 which was the last major war of the US Military..The others were Brush fire wars..In fact the US Military took on the bad habits of the German army...they built great weapons but costly and extremely technical to maintain...
LOL, that is one that I always think of...how they must have gritted their teeth at him!
“You blockade the Persian Gulf, shutting down their economy”
The Dow the next morning would be fun. We would shut down half the world’s economy at the same time.
Meanwhile, more rockets than anyone has ever seen would get launched on Israel from every direction.
Then in an all out attack, there are Iranian cells all over America. Bombs start going off at malls, etc.
Iraq was supposed to greet us as liberators. When Hitler launched his attack on the USSR they were supposed to implode and it would be over in three months.
We could always win, if we want. But things might not be as easy as you seem to think. Iran is four times the size of Iraq and twice the size of Texas. And Iranians are a much smarter and more industrious people than Saudis or other Arabs.
Without lend lease, the USSR could have had some tanks or some trucks but not enough of either to mount sustained offensives.
You’ll also read history wonks who “surveyed” battlefield data post WW2 and say that air strikes made no statistical difference at the tactical level against German armored units.
This is because when air strikes did take out a tank, it would be left abandoned. And when allied tankers came upon that tank, they wouldn’t know it was abandoned so they’d put fire upon that tank just to make sure. So, the tank had direct fire damage and would be “counted” as a ground fire kill.
Statistics mess up lots of things, especially by people who have no clue how processes actually work.
I don’t know of *ANYONE* except a few paid pundits and rabid neocons who thinks this is anything other than Gulf Of Tonkin 2. And I personally know of no one who thinks we were actually attacked there. And most of the people I know of who even think we should EVER have even been in Vietnam are here on FR.
Idiotic to go to war ANYWHERE until we secure our borders. And only then with a hell of a lot more justification than a few missiles fired at ships that many Americans don’t feel should even be there.
If it’s not worth nuking a place to glass, it’s not worth one bullet or one dime.
Many Iranians will be quite quick to tell you they aren’t Arabs!
However good our justification for helping to remove Mohammad Mosaddegh, I don’t blame anyone in Iran for still being pissed; it’s only been 65 years in a region where they get livid about things from 1500 years ago.
Not our circus, not our monkeys.
In the end, the morally failed nazi sex abuse and mass murder on the eastern front doomed them as badly as any weapon.
The nazi army’s treatment of normal people was counterproductive in the extreme. It made sure that every soviet citizen forgot the abuse of the Bolsheviks, and bitterly fought the foreign invader.
There was a very plausible chance that had the German armies pouring into Russia and Ukraine treated people decently, they would have prevailed. There are numerous accounts of Ukrainians who believed the Germans were a decent people and might be their salvation.
As much as weapons, lend lease, and allied bombing, the flat out evil of the nazis doomed them once open war broke out. You can be evil inside your own country a very long time, but when you cross borders and go on the road, the evil nation usually loses.
“You’ll also read history wonks who “surveyed” battlefield data post WW2 and say that air strikes made no statistical difference at the tactical level against German armored units.”
The German soldiers repeatedly offer a very different take on the effectiveness of the P-47s and Tempests. They were terrified of the “Jabos” and avoided moving in the daytime if at all possible.
Agree. If they’d treated the Ukranians decently the outcome is different.
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