Posted on 06/05/2019 6:24:22 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
I think you nailed it right there.
While the Soviets were building huge dams and railroads, touting their industrial expertise in the twenties and thirties, a huge segment of their population were what we would characterize as country rubes living like it was the year 1740 with handmade farming implements and donkey carts...if not human drawn carts.
Stalin sold their collective souls for plots of land, then they act outraged when they are stabbed in the back by their erstwhile ally.
It would be hilarious if it were not so bloody and tragic.
“The Soviet Union lost over 25 million lives in what it calls the Great Patriotic War, and Moscow under President Vladimir Putin has taken to marking victory in the war with a massive annual military parade on Red Square. “
What was that saying? Combat-ready troops will flunk inspection (parades), but parade-ready troops will flunk combat. Think Vlad ever heard that?
Without US-made trucks the Soviet armies would have been tightly tied to their rail lines. Even small mechanized counterattacks by the Germans would have devastated leg infantry and tanks that couldn’t go far for lack of fuel trucks. Plus a good chunk of Soviet frontal aviation were Bell P-39’s and P-63’s.
Finally, Stalin was begging for a “second front” beginning in 1942, and his complaints only got louder until he finally got the Normandy landings. A big part of the western allies’ Italian fiasco was driven by a need to placate Uncle Joe.
We couldn’t have landed in 1942 in any strength for multiple reasons. Chief among them was a lack of landing craft. Heck, Normandy was pushed back from May to June by Eisenhower just to get another “month’s worth” of LST production over to England. They’d already stripped the Med of all it’s LST’s which pushed back the Anvil Landings in southern France to August. The original plan had those landings to be near-simultaneous.
I’ve always believed that the US Army needed to be “blooded” — North Africa & Sicily did that. It worked the kinks out in our Operational methods and taught important tactical lessons to the units that would be in the 1st wave at Normandy. Italy probably was a foolish move. The Germans were able to bottle up 2+ allied armies with a relative handful of divisions through skillful use of terrain.
Germany was done after Stalingrad AND Tunisia. They lost 2 heavily mechanized field armies within the a few months. In Tunisia they actually lost the 5th Army plus the remnants of the Afrika Korps
Yes, I am very aware of that. The Tupolev Tu-4 is a copy of the B-29.
Agreed! To me the most interesting part is that Stalin, despite piles of reliable intel from his own people and German defectors (let alone the Allies),refused to believe that Hitler was going to invade Russia or pretended to as to not stop them. One of the truly incomprehensible non-events in the history of war that will never make any sense.
Stalingrad and Kursk were more decisive than Normandy or even the Battle of the Bulge.
The Allies played a significant role but the Russians destroyed the Wermacht
Another little known fact: Had the invasion of Japan occured, the Soviets would have landed in the Kuriles and Hokkaido — because the US Navy would have delivered them there.
“The Western Allies would have waltzed into Berlin”
Possibly. But up to that point there were a lot of German civilians who were being strung up for cooperating with the US, Brits & French troops. SS dead-enders were as brutal on their own people as ISIS is today.
I fail to see where anyone was diminishing the Soviets very massive contribution of a river of blood.
The sad part is that this was all the Soviet Empire was capable of, since their tyrant murdered every competent general, and the only ones left could think of nothing else other than using millions of young boys and old men as 24-7 machine gun fodder, simply to prevent the machine guns from moving forward.
Yes, it worked. Yes, it was a massive sacrifice. But it didn't have to be that way, had Stalin had any competent military minds left alive.
” A modern military would have simply bypassed it and seized the nearby oil fields.”
Disagree. You’d be foolish to leave an unoccupied city on the near bank of a river in your rear. Your giving the enemy a free pass to cross the river and strike. Plus, in winter it’s far better to house your troops in a town or city.
I think where the Germans went wrong was not stopping before they hit the last few blocks before the river. The Germans had over 80% of the city, They could have easily cordoned off the rest. The bombed out factory buildings along the waterfront lacked the depth for the Soviets to use as a bridgehead. Chuikov’s troops were hanging on by their fingernails right up until the city got surrounded because Von Paulus went all-in.
(Also a bit tacky to bring it up during the commemoration of the sacrifices made at D-Day. Maybe wait a week next time.)
And how many of that 25,000,000 were killed by their own people?
It seems that they spent as much time, if not more, killing their own people.
And the Germans were surrendering whole divisions at a time to the allies as fast as they could to get away from the Russians. Himmler, head of the SS and many senior SS thought that America and the rest of the allies would team up with Germany and fight the Russians. That’s how deluded they were.
The Russians demanded that the goods we sent to them were labeled as aid from Communist US Organizations, like “The Workers Party of New York”.
The real hard fighting would come in the hedgerow country.
By that time, German Air Power was virtually non-existent.
They also got sidetracked by Churchill’s insistence of going through Italy.
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