Posted on 01/29/2021 7:38:15 AM PST by daniel1212
Dennis Weidner,
There is no doubt that it is was the Red Army that tore the heart out of the German Army. Vladimir accurately quotes PM Churchill on this. President Roosevelt said basically the same thing. And there is no Western historian of any importance who disagrees. Only people who get their history from Hollywood disagree. Unfortunately this seems to be the case of many Russians who have in their head that Americans question the importance of the Red Army. It simply is not true.
Several points need to be made in connection with this topic.
First the Soviet Union was not an Allied power. It was a co-belligerent. In fact for nearly the first two years of the War, the Soviets were allied with the NAZIS, both launching the War by invading Poland.. The Soviets conducted terrible atrocities in Poland and the other countries they invaded (1939–41). The Soviet NKVD behaved much like the NAZI SS. And the Soviets supported the NAZI war machine by shipping vast quantities of oil, strategic metals, and grain to NAZI Germany.
The Soviets were not only a NAZI ally, the two totalitarian giants JOINTLY invaded and partitioned Europe between themselves. They then BOTH committed terrible atrocities and bickered over the boundaries (1939–41). In addition, Stalin actually wanted to join the Axis. Only Hitler’s objections prevented this.
It is true that the Red Army had to fight the Germans virtually alone for nearly 2 years on the Eastern Front. But part of the reason for this was that the Soviets aid the Germans by the huge deliveries of material to defeat the French and drive Britain from the Continent. Having to fight alone was the Soviets own doing.
Now while it is certainly true that it was the Red Army that tore the heart out of the German Army, it is also true that the Western Allies played an important role in the defeat of NAZI Germany. Here it is important to note that it is not Americans denying the importance of the Red Army, it is Russians who deny the importance of the Western Allies.
In that connection, here is a partial list of what the Western Allies did:
1. American diplomacy so infuriated the Japanese and threatened their main interest (China) that they shifted their military plans from a Strike North to a Strike South strategy. Of course the battles with the Red Army (July 1939) were also a factor.) World War II Japan road to World War II
2. The RAF severely damaged the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe was weaker in 1941 than when it played a key role in the German Western Offensive (1940). As a result the Wehrmacht had less air support than it had in the West. This is often ignored in Barbarossa assessments. Without the Battle of Britain, Hitler would have had an air force twice as large as he had in 1940. World War II air campaign -- Battle of Britain
3. British activity in the Mediterranean resulted in Hitler's Balkan adventure, delaying Barbarossa. The delay made a huge difference. If the Wehrmacht had had only a few more weeks of good weather, they may well have succeeded in destroying the Red Army. World War II Axis invasion of the Balkans
4. Another reason that Barbarossa failed is that Stalin was able to move sizable Siberian forces west and mount an offensive before Moscow (December 1941). The reason he was able to do this is American pressure on Japan forced them together end their war in China or attack the United states. They chose war with America. World War II Pacific naval campaigns -- Pearl Harbor
5. Although the Western Allies were not on the Continent in 1941, Britain being in the war, forced the Germans to maintain a substantial force in France. The Germany could not throw their full weight against the Soviets. World War II German occupation of France
6. American Lend Lease had an enormous impact on the Soviet war effort. Perhaps the most important was American trucks. Without the mobility provided by the trucks, the great Soviet victories of 1943-44 would not have been possible. And the without Lend Lease food, many Soviets would have starved. The Soviets may have prevailed without American help, but it would have taken them longer and it would have been at far greater cost. World War II campaigns -- Arsenal of Democracy Lend Lease countries Soviet Union
7. The Allied strategic bombing campaign had a massive impact on the German war economy. Without the air campaign, the Red Army would have faced better equipped German and other Axis troops. In addition, the Luftwaffe had to be pulled back to protect German cities. and huge numbers of artillery pieces had to be pointed up around German cities rather than deployed in the East. The quantity of ammunition not available in the East was massive. Second World War II Allied strategic bombing campaign
8. While the Heer was broken in the East. The Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine were both broken in the West. In terms of manpower, the German losses were highest in the East. But i terms of industrial production, a very substantial part of the NAZI war economy was devoted to the Luftwaffe and Keiegsmarine (especially efforts to build improved U-boats in 1944 1nd 45). And the effort to build secret weapons like the V-weapons was primarily aimed at the West. While German manpower was primarily committed to the East, the German war economy was not committed to the East to the same degree. World War II naval campaigns -- the Atlantic phase 2
9. German soldiers were primarily deployed in the East, but it is important to note that German industry, science, and technology was not comparably oriented. The fact that Britain remained in the War caused the Germans to significantly increase priorities to the Navy, especially U-boats. This diverted huge quantities of steel from tank and artillery production. The air war was even more important. Not only did the Strategic Bombing Campaign force the Germans to deploy much of their artillery and ammunition around German cities, but aircraft production was a sizeable component of German industry. Running the numerous, about half if German industry, perhaps more than, half was supporting the war in the West, not the War in the East. Germany World War II -- German industry
10. The British at first and then aided by America blockaded German/Axis ports. This meant the Germans were unable to import needed raw materials except from Sweden and a few other neutrals bordering on NAZI controlled territory. World War II -- economics raw materials food metals
11. While Hitler was able to deploy most of his land forces in the East. This changed after Alamein and Torch. Thus in 1943-45, he was forced to deploy substantial forces in the West, relieving pressure in the Red Army. World War II Western Desert : Afrika Koprs
12. The Western Allies passed on insights gained through Ultra to the Soviets. The Soviets passed on nothing learned from their intelligence efforts to the Allies. World War II -- cracking the German Enigma code systems Ultra
13. Japan was unable to threaten the Soviets from the east even after failing to aid Barbarossa. After Midway, the Japanese were so heavily engaged by America that they no longer had the strength to attack the Soviet Union. https://www.histclo.com/essay/war/ww2/sea/pac/ncp-mid.html
14. The American Arsenal of Democracy overpowered the Axis. America had the largest economy in the world and after Pearl Harbor it was mobilized for war. And the Axis economies could simply not keep match it. World War II campaigns -- arsenal of democracy
15. Financing war is an often overlooked topic, in part because it does not interest military historians. An here again America led the way. No country in history had ever spent so much money on a war. And no country had ever ended a war with such a massive debt. World War II -- United States financing the war borrowing
Pretty much after The Battle of the Bulge, they could have been in Berlin within a few months. The BOTB was their last shot.
Operation Keelhaul.
Well, we also sent them Shermans. And the UK provided a few (466) Churchills.
“Most visibly, the United States provided the Soviet Union with more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 14,000 aircraft, 8,000 tractors and construction vehicles, and 13,000 battle tanks”
So we sent 13000 tanks. Keep in mind that the USSR produced 60000 T-34s. So we provided almost of 18% of the Soviet medium armor. I would say that was ‘substantial.’
Also, Japan attacking eastern Siberia ... why? It’s endless wilderness, frozen part of the year and mud and mosquitoes the rest, with barely any roads and (at the time) one decent railway. You have hundreds of miles to cover before you get to anything worth conquering, and your forces would be very thinly spread, hard to resupply, and easy for an enemy to break through.
Some Slavs were more equal than others, he pretty much left the Czechs and Slovaks alone, with the exception of reprisals (Lidice, for example). They certainly didn't face the hardships that the Poles did.
Lend Lease was only for the British, prior to our entry in to the war 1941. We outright GAVE Stalin vast quantities of trucks, guns, airplanes, raw metals, (including fissile materials according to one source), and FOOD. Stalin having destroyed the productivity of Ukraine all by himself, we had to provide virtually 100% of the food required for his armies.
The book is "Feeding the Bear", giving a lot of detail about that. Now OOP and hard to come by for less than $200. Alas my copy was borrowed and not returned decades ago. Our guys hated SPAM, but the Soviet troops loved it!
Also not widely known is how we built an entire two-track railroad across Iran, from the Gulf of Hormuz to the Soviet border, to transport all this. Much more went via this route than by the infamous convoys to Murmansk. Control of the Med and the Suez Canal were vital to this route. Had the Brits not fought Rommel to a standstill, and with the help of Operation Torch evicted him from North Africa, (thereby neutering the Luftwaffe in southern Italy), the situation would have been entirely different.
Airplanes and some less weighty/bulky cargoes were flown via Alaska, which necessitated the building of a chain of airfields, often in inaccessible places where the only logistical route was by air to begin with. The famous AlCan Highway was carved out firstly to get fuel and supplies to those airfields.
Actually they could have probably been in the outskirts of Berlin within weeks, not months after TBOTB.
Germans were surrending right and left to the Western Allies by that time.
One of the conditions for Lend Lease that Stalin demanded, was that the supplies could not be labelled as coming from the US Government, but from “Friendly US Organizations” like the “Workers Party of New York” or somesuch.
Russia won the war for the Allies? Marxist propaganda.
The US was already fighting a war in the Atlantic with Germans. We were convoying ships halfway across the Atlantic - ships filled with US built war materials. And we attacked German Uboats. That was an act of war by any rational definition.
Also, the Germans had already sunk US ships - look up the USS Reuben James.
The Germans were willing overlook this if we did. And FDR might have had a problem getting the US to declare war on Germany if Hitler had not declared it first.
I’ve read some of these statistics. I was shaking my head and thinking, “They have to have put the decimal point in the wrong spot.”
That was probably not the main reason Germany didn't build the bomb. One reason is that most of the better physicists were either Jewish, had Jewish spouses, or emigrated because they (wisely) loathed the Nazis.
There were a few very good ones left, though. Supposedly the Wehrmacht visited them in 1942 and asked if they could guarantee a working weapon in two years. (It took the US longer than that.) The scientists declined, and the army said, "Okay, thanks, the war will be decided in two years anyway; we'll concentrate on other things" and put the nuclear program on the back-burner as far as funding.
You've heard the story, haven't you, about how the OSS sent an agent to Switzerland to assassinate Werner Heisenberg to stop the Nazi nuclear program. Heisenberg thought the assassin was from the Gestapo!
Soviet General Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov defended at the Battle of Moscow and was captured by the German while trying to break the siege of Leningrad/St.Petersburg. He defected to the Germans in a major propaganda coup. Modern opinion is that it was a combination of pragmatism and personal knowledge of Stalin.
From 1935-39, Stalin initiated a series of internal attacks that have come to be known as "The Great Purge". From the 'Kulaks' (Ukraine) to the Red Army, a multitude of institutions and society itself was faced with oppression and show trials on an unprecedented scale. When Vlasov was captured in mid-1942, Stalin had already stated that all surrendering Russians would be treated as traitors if repatriated.
So, yes, even AFTER the German/NAZI atrocities of 1941-43, many Russians looked at what had occurred earlier in and by their own government and had a hard time deciding between the frying pan and the fire!
Hitler’s demanding that the Me262 be a bomber as well delayed its use as an interceptor.
One I often wonder about regarding the V2 rocket: Hitler was working toward an atom bomb as well as a “New York” bomber. If he had left the Soviets alone and focused on his technology, and beat England, eliminating an 8th air force threat, he could have basically replaced the USSR as the worlds competition in the cold war with the US.
In fact, I just remembered I read a novel called, The Fatherland, that takes place in the mid-60’s and is in a world where the two major powers are the US and the German empire.
> I would have gone straight to Moscow, and tried to get the Soviet government to collapse. <
That’s what Napoleon did when he invaded Russia in 1812. And Napoleon got badly beaten. Hitler was determined not to make that same mistake. So he pretty much ignored Moscow in 1941, and concentrated instead on destroying Soviet armies.
What Hitler didn’t understand (but you did) was that Moscow was way more important in 1941 than it was in 1812. In 1941 Moscow was not only a political prize. It was also major industrial area and a railway hub.
While I’m rambling here, I’m going to give Stalin a bit of credit. When Hitler did get around to moving on Moscow, Stalin’s advisers urged him to flee eastward. Stalin refused, and remained in the capital. That did a lot for Russian morale.
Should also mention that— included in the murdered Russian POWs was the commander of the White Russian Cossacks: Peter Krasnov Lt. Cmdr Don Cossaks and 5 other White Russian commanders Vyacheslav Naumenko, Timofey Domanov, Sultan Kelech Ghirey, and Andrei Shkuro of the Kuban Cossack.
The Commies followed up on them after all that time, through WWII. Tolstoy does note that Churchill unlike the stupid OSS Americans in Ukraine (come to think of it- did that include at that time William Barr’s father? Hmmm), held back quite a lot of White Russians/anti-communists for their deployment in post war Russian satellite states in Brit Intel (this fact may or may not have been shared with American OSS but probably did make it through to Philby and thus— they were still taken out).
Long memories and persistence: the NKVD murdered the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who slipped into the Ukraine and reported (through NYTimes rival paper baron William R. Hearsts papers) on the truth of the Holodomor. Gareth Jones outed the criminal Pulitzer winner Walter Duranty (who was parenthetically a real pervert whom Lenin/Stalin controlled by blackmail and “keeping him happy in his pleasures”) who lied in every way about the Holodomor and the Soviet Union. A propagandist for Stalin employed by the NYTimes— who would have thought that...... heh.
An important factor in the Soviet Union’s victory over the Nazis was its oil production. Oil production which was made possible by Fred Koch who had built many refineries in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. The processes that Koch had developed were considered incompatible by western oil producers and so he sold them to the Soviet Union.
Ironically, it was as a result of Fred Koch’s experiences in the Soviet Union that he became an anti-communist.
Any discussion of what won the war for the allies must include the Ultra decrypts.
I wonder if it's because Stalin realized if he left Moscow, he most likely would have been overthrown.
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