Posted on 06/05/2019 6:24:22 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Russia told the West on Wednesday the Normandy landings on D-Day in 1944 did not play a decisive role in ending World War II and that the Allied war effort should not be exaggerated.
Moscow's comments might irk war veterans in Britain where the 75th anniversary on Wednesday of the largest seaborne invasion in history was marked at a ceremony in Portsmouth attended by Queen Elizabeth and world leaders including Donald Trump and Angela Merkel.
Speaking at a weekly news conference in Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova offered a tribute to those who died on the western front of World War II and said Moscow appreciated the Allied war effort.
"It should of course not be exaggerated. And especially not at the same time as diminishing the Soviet Union's titanic efforts, without which this victory simply would not have happened," she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at themoscowtimes.com ...
That is bizarre, the accounts of people in the gulags bursting into tears when they heard he died. It’s right up there with people who saw all the abuse is happening, and thought “if only Stalin knew”. They would write letters the Stalin explaining what they were seeing, and he would have them arrested also. I think a lot of that must be because the USSR was a very backwards agrarian country at the time. Beaten down by centuries of czarist rule, and they just had no sophistication to allow them to understand. Half the USSR still lived in buildings with grass roofs at that time. Many of their people lived like it was 200 years
That was a big one but there was an even bigger one:
The drive to Stalingrad was executed by an German general extremely proficient in the field. When he went sick Hitler replaced him with a General who was a GENIUS at HQ on the telephone and on paper but was verrry thin on field expertise.
The soon-to-be defenders of Stalingrad were on the run, nearly totally encircled and doomed when this inexperienced General happened on the pre-Stalingrad scene.
"OK, taking the city is going to be a biiiig job, so rest up..!"
For a casual hiker or camper it sounds pretty ordinary common-sense but it was an unthinkable blunder, the very worst type of thing an experienced General would ever do:
Which would you prefer to fight; a war of German mobility using your tank forte against scads of fleeing, on-the-run Russian troops, without fighting positions, or instead fight a war of little mobility in a city teeming with dug-in defenders utterly contemptuous of death..?
The first route favors the German Army, the second has been the preserve of Soviets for over 100 years.
He should have pressed his advantage at any cost immediately, encircling the harried Red Army on the open expanses of the steppes, then taking the mostly undefended Capital city.
Stalingrad was lost in the 3 or so days right before the actual Battle of Stalingrad.
The Germans practically lost the war as early as winter 1941 near Moscow. Their blizcrieg failed and they weren’t geared for the protracted war of attrition which was to follow with certainty. Even the Nazis realized it.
Their only hope at that time was a pipe dream of separate peace with Western allies. In 1942 with own resources depleted Stalin tried some poorly planned offensives which failed giving the Germans another hope but it was stupid and actually over as proved in Stalingrad.
Kurks wasn’t really that important being just a confirmation of fact that the Germans are over in the East.
Land-lease was important but it was in fact less than one tenth of materiel used by the Soviets. It was sensitive in terms of motor vehicles and radio equipment. As mentioned by previous posters the Germans were moving of foot and the Soviets on trucks which was somehow sensitive. Was it crucial? Probably not.
Now the allied bombing of the German infrastructure was helpful and also distracted Luftwaffe allowing Soviets to gain air superiority over Germans earlier.
As for the landing in Normandy it is questionable would it affect anything or not in any meaningful sense.
I think the point of the allied land invasion was more to insure that the Soviet forces won’t move beyond agreed zones into Western Europe.
Yep.
That’s pretty much it.
I don’t think taking Moscow would have made any difference. They have lost Moscow before, so that wasn’t a new thing for them. Sort of like when we lost DC to the British, didn’t slow us down a bit. I think like they did under Napoleon, relocate somewhere to the East, and keep fighting. The Germans always believed grabbing important cities was way more important than it really was.
Your point is well taken. Once the battle at Stalingrad was done...virtually every German general felt that winning the war was now impossible. That was December 1942. The only German leader who felt otherwise, was Hitler.
After defeating the Germans,we should have kicked the Russians back to their border with German help.
“” “” After defeating the Germans,we should have kicked the Russians back to their border with German help.”” “”
It was what the German were hoping for since late 1941 but it was not realistic for both political and military reasons.
Without the D-Day landing, France would have been taken over by a Stalinist govt like East Germany, Poland, etc. I believe the key invasion was Italy. That invasion drew German troops away from Kursk and helped the Soviets win more quickly. And I remember that Stalin was always pressuring Roosevelt and Churchill to provide another Invasion to take the pressure off of the Soviet troops in their advancement.
Also, the USSR wasn’t fighting the other two Axis nations. The Soviets didn’t bother declaring war on Japan until 9 August 1945.
The Soviets also detained USAAF aircrews that happened to land on Soviet soil after attacks on Imperial Japan.
“” “” Also, the USSR wasn’t fighting the other two Axis nations. The Soviets didn’t bother declaring war on Japan until 9 August 1945.”” “”
In fact USSR was at war with all the Axis powers except Japan. It didn’t fight with Japan bacause the latter promised USSR non-aggresion and ignored Nazi demands to join Soviet campaign.
It ended exactly on August 9 because it was agreed between Stalin and FDR. The Soviets attacked the Japanese precisely at the time other allies wanted.
“Maybe the USSR wouldn’t have lost 25 million lives if it first hadn’t sold its soul to Germany for a piece of Poland, and then compounded it by driving their troops through minefields at the point of a gun.”
People so on the mark here and Pukey can go, well you know.
This may be the best thread on here in quite a while.
True. German soldiers looked for American troops to whom to surrender. But they knew the Russians were going to be brutal to them, so Germans encountering Russians? They fought fiercely.
Yeah. FDR was a piece of work, he was.
“don’t believe the claim that a portion of the gold was not recovered) :)
Wow! Aye aye Cap.
Patton? Is that you?
Russia seems to forget that they couldn’t move their troops and supplies without our 8,000 train engines and cars, plus thousands of planes, bombs, chemical, metals, food, etc.
The Germans had destroyed a lot of the Soviet’s production capabilities west of the Urals which was where Stalin was establishing his new war industries.
The Soviet women fliers known as the “Black Widows” flew a lot of U.S. P-39 Airacorbras, which, with heavy fuselage armor, enabled them to wreak havoc among German armored forces.
The Red Army sacrificed so many men in poorly coordinated offensives, using ski troops to sacrifice themselves as human landmine clearing machines. They also used tens of thousands, if not more, of their invaded European countries captives, esp. Poland, in nearly unarmed “penal battalions”.
A late friend of mine, Red Army Major Avram Shifrin, was put into a “Jewish penal battalion”. The first wave had weapons. When they were wiped out, the second wave had to get their weapons to fight the Germans until they were wiped out. Then came the third wave. Few Jews and Poles, etc. survived any Soviet “penal battalion”.
The Russian soldiers were brave, but too often they had to fight at the point of a commissar’s gun/rifle, not out of any great love to save Stalin.
Remember, Stalin wiped out most of his top Red Army generals and senior officers in the “Great Terror” of the 1930’s (See Robert Conquest’s book of the same title). When the Germans attacked, and Moscow knew when and where, Stalin’s forces were significantly unprepared for it.
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