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General Category => Huh? => Topic started by: ChrisSmolinski on October 20, 2018, 2247 UTC
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(https://i.imgur.com/eexTo2t.png)
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I bet they were lined up around the block for that...lol
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Are we talking about his official death or when his circle of cronies got up the nerve to go in and check? There was quite a delay.
I don't know if they were afraid of him playing dead with a pistol hidden under the blankets or he'd reach out and drag them to Hell with him?
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Prokofiev died the very same day. Poor guy.
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Are we talking about his official death or when his circle of cronies got up the nerve to go in and check? There was quite a delay.
I don't know if they were afraid of him playing dead with a pistol hidden under the blankets or he'd reach out and drag them to Hell with him?
Pretty sure they all had reservations for the trip, anyway.
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But what about all the good things Stalin did?
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But what about all the good things Stalin did?
You'd have to ask Vlad about that.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/23/russia-bans-historical-comedy-death-stalin-extremist-content/
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Yep, in the summer of 2017 Putin announced they were rehabilitating Stalin's reputation after sixty plus years on the outs. That Vlad, he's a laugh a minute!
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The whole thing about Stalin that ranks me, other than the democide where he murdered more Russians than Hitler, is they think they won ww2 on their own. They're right next door to Japan, do you suppose they attacked Japan while blasting the allies for not opening a second front against Germany speedily enough for Moscow? Hell no, the bastards waited till the end of the war before they attacked an already beaten Japan. Also, Hitler beat Stalin to the punch. Stalin was massing armor at the new border with Germany after Russia and Germany split Poland. His intent was to wait till Germany and western Europe had worn themselves down from years of fighting, then Russia would roll the tanks in as a "humanitarian gesture". So instead of all of Europe being under Stalin, only eastern Europe suffered such humiliation.
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Apparently Stalin had a bit of a nervous breakdown after Hitler invaded the USSR. It never dawned on Stalin that you can't trust a fellow psychopath. That crazy Uncle Joe.
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Apparently Stalin had a bit of a nervous breakdown after Hitler invaded the USSR. It never dawned on Stalin that you can't trust a fellow psychopath. That crazy Uncle Joe.
That's a popular but not entirely accurate interpretation. Stalin was in denial, but it was more because he was faced with the consequences of his own blundering, which he mistook for genius. He never really trusted Hitler, though like any narcissistic personality, he was attracted to another dictator.
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Apparently Stalin had a bit of a nervous breakdown after Hitler invaded the USSR. It never dawned on Stalin that you can't trust a fellow psychopath. That crazy Uncle Joe.
It didn't help that Stalin's (paranoid) purges had wiped out most of the Red Army's officer corps in the years before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Soviet intelligence also told Stalin's inner circle several times that the Germans were going to invade but if the information actually got to Stalin is questionable...you don't want to disagree with a dictator...if Uncle Joe says they're not going to invade then they're not going to invade. That, and when they did invade, as MDK2 mentioned, Stalin was in denial.
One must remember that while the USSR was integral in beating the Nazi war machine (pure manpower, the sheer size of Russia and weather that the Germans were not prepared for), the United States provided the vast majority of materiel needed to keep the Red Army running via Lend-Lease. Things like radios, waterproof field telephone wire, trucks, food, oil, fuel, etc. - the amount of aid provided to the Soviets during WWII is absolutely staggering. The majority of the Studebaker US6 2.5 ton 6x6 trucks made were sent to the USSR instead of Great Britain or used by our own armed forces. Russia provided the millions of men for the Red Army, the USA provided the materiel (to a great extent) that the Red Army needed to win the war in the East against the Nazis.
Good ol' Vladdy loves Uncle Joe and wants the rest of the world to remember all the great things he did. Stalin simply has a bad rap, that's all. Putin wants to set the record straight, Russian style. ::)
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It's unfortunate that we didn't let Stalin and Hitler whack each other a bit harder, like Churchill apparently wanted.
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Apparently Stalin had a bit of a nervous breakdown after Hitler invaded the USSR. It never dawned on Stalin that you can't trust a fellow psychopath. That crazy Uncle Joe.
Good ol' Vladdy loves Uncle Joe and wants the rest of the world to remember all the great things he did. Stalin simply has a bad rap, that's all. Putin wants to set the record straight, Russian style. ::)
Short murderous guys always stick together. Ask Randy Newman about them.
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FDR and Churchill let Stalin take eastern Europe, restraining Patton and his idea to rearm the Germans and attack the Russians and drive them back to Russia. I wonder why this outcome to the war was acceptable to them yet Hitler doing much the same as Stalin was bad and wrong and worth fighting over.
The Germans had real combat experience with their new combined arms blitzkrieg tactic in France and Poland, they knew how best to use what they had from real world experience. Nothing Poland had was up to the task as far as war materials save in sheer numbers, the Poles still had and used cavalry against German tanks and machine gunners with the expected results, Poland had similar numbers of men in the field but it just swelled prisoner of war camps. The Poles flew biplanes against ME109s and were slaughtered, of course the same happened to Russia early in the campaign. The Russians were stockpiling armor just across their new border with Germany at the time Germany attacked, and this armor would be suitable to take on men and lightly armored vehicles as one might find at the end of a long drawn out war between France, England, and Germany, but not against the armor the Germans (and French) had then, much less an answer to German tactics. The Russians lost thousands of tanks and planes in the first few days, this likely added to Stalin's initial depression as the numbers of men and machines destroyed were really fantastic and hard to accept, so many destroyed tanks and planes had been claimed by German forces that Hitler himself had to investigate weather it was true.
This is a link to Hitler and Mannerheim discussing what Germany found inside Russia, note the commentary regarding 35k tanks and a tank factory that had shifts of 60k workers;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oET1WaG5sFk
Stalin was up to something but was undone by another megalomaniac.
This 100 kilometers a day tank advance common in the initial days in the Russian campaign wasn't the case in the west when Germany invaded France, the top tank in western Europe was the French Char B, much thicker armor than any German tank in the field and superior to anything Russia then fielded. One of the problems for France was Germany had infiltrated their intelligence guys into France just before the attack and were using French telephone networks against the French. What this resulted in was fake reports being accepted as fact by civilian and military authorities and the encouragement of French civilians to flee and clog the roads for miles, hindering French military response to a fantastic degree. This communications trickery never gets mentioned as a deciding factor in the defeat of France, but how France used their superior tanks should take the blame. If the French had employed their tanks as the Germans did theirs, there's a good chance France would have rolled the Germans back over the borders, but instead of combining their tanks in an army they allotted them out in little packets here and there where their presence didn't really amount to much. When the French decided to mass their armor it was too late, but their one massed armor attack severely hindered the German supply train, the focus of the attack.
Here's a link to a book by a guy who was present in German signals intelligence in ww1 and ww2, if you're into this stuff it makes great reading. The author wrote his experiences a few years after ww2 and the US Gov/future nsa bought the rights to it as it revealed some methods used against the Russians the allies wanted to remain secret. For a few years you could hardly find these works anywhere and only in print, and one day I found nsa had released them entirely as pdfs on their own webpage but now apparently the nsa has decided to no longer host them so here's an external link;
https://cryptome.org/2015/04/nsa-war-secrets-in-the-ether-p1-p2.pdf
https://cryptome.org/2015/04/nsa-war-secrets-in-the-ether-p3.pdf
What all this combat experience in Poland and France added up to is the Germans exacted 11 Russians for every German casualty. Apparently for the western allies the Germans inflicted twice as many casualties as they took. Better training, better tactics, in some cases superior arms. Tyrants like Stalin and Zhukov had no issue ordering masses of men to their deaths to attempt to take an objective, they had the men to dispose of as they wished. Germany had some 70 million population, Russia has 189 million people in 1939 so you can see Russia had cannon fodder to spare. America was similar in some respects to Russia as we had no shortage of manpower or materials so our generals were willing to risk their men as if it was nothing, while the Brits used tactics and superior firepower to reduce the Germans obstructing them as the Brits at home would not stand mass casualties that barely rated notice in the US and was laughed at in Russia.
Some asides;
When Germany invaded Poland, France invaded Germany.
The French crossed the border and took some barely defended towns/villages and met little opposition, then they retreated back to France! This put Hitler and his general staff in a panic as almost all his forces were inside Poland and nowhere near the French border, they knew they couldn't stop the French. The way was clear all the way to Berlin, and the French retreated, and instead of French Poilus parading past the Brandenburg Gate (in Berlin) in Triomphe over Nazi Germany, Hitler's landsers paraded in Paris every day.
This folly was followed by one of Germany's making. After Dunkirk, England had no armor or artillery to speak of, it was all abandoned on the shores of France. Hitler had most all his forces, forces with fresh combat experience, within visible distance of the cliffs of Dover. If Hitler had made the effort, England likely would have been his. Then he could have focused on Russia.
The next folly was Germany's too. When Goering had RAF fighter command on the ropes with bombing their bases and shooting down Brit fighters, he changed course mid stream and bombed cities instead of RAF bases, apparently a Brit bomber formation had bombed a German city and so the Germans wanted to exact vengeance. Once again Hitler snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory.
Another folly was Hitler divided his forces and sent them off the road to victory when Moscow was in sight, as in his soldiers could actually see Moscow. He sent some armies down south to take oil wells in the Caucasus, and some up north to take Stalingrad and so on. Lost at Stalingrad, never set foot in Moscow. Never saw the several divisions of arctic trained Soviet troops with their new T34 tanks that worked at -60f, unlike German tanks, that were about to snap shut the jaws of a steel trap around the 7th Army until it was too late.
Sorry, I'm a huge ww2 nerd and being able to vent is cathartic.
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It's unfortunate that we didn't let Stalin and Hitler whack each other a bit harder, like Churchill apparently wanted.
The Soviets would have wound up with even more territory in Europe that way. It's I don't think I've ever heard that Churchill wanted that.
DR and Churchill let Stalin take eastern Europe, restraining Patton and his idea to rearm the Germans and attack the Russians and drive them back to Russia.
No way they could reorganize. No way to sell that to a public exhausted by war. What, the Germans are suddenly our allies now? After the Holocaust? And after every German soldier who could, was running for the west as fast as he could? They weren't killing 11 Soviet soldiers for every one German in 1945. There's a good reason for civilians ultimately being in charge of the military.
Stalingrad (the current Volgograd, and the one time Tsaritsyn) is south of Moscow, FWIW, not north.
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It's unfortunate that we didn't let Stalin and Hitler whack each other a bit harder, like Churchill apparently wanted.
The Soviets would have wound up with even more territory in Europe that way. It's I don't think I've ever heard that Churchill wanted that.
A weaker USSR would not have been able to take control of eastern Europe, we might have contained the Soviets at the traditional Russian border.
Of course as long as we're playing what if games... the US should never have entered WWI. Then there would have been no WWII. People talk about going back in time and killing Hitler... Woodrow Wilson is better target. ;D
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Josh, you might be as much of a WWII/military history nerd as me...although I have a feeling a lot of members of this board have a better understanding and appreciation of history compared to the general public.
Patton's vision regarding the dangers of the Russians immediately after the defeat of the Third Reich turned out to be well-founded. In a post-war world, the Germans have turned out to be much like the Americans - something American troops remarked on even immediately after the Nazis surrendered. I'm just glad that we didn't turn all of Germany into farmland like some folks wanted to. The seeds of the Second World War were planted at the end of the First World War.
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In a post-war world, the Germans have turned out to be much like the Americans - something American troops remarked on even immediately after the Nazis surrendered. I'm just glad that we didn't turn all of Germany into farmland like some folks wanted to.
Agreed, Nazi Germany was an aberration. An evil one, of course. By helping them (and Japan) after WWII with massive economic aid, we moved them swiftly to the democracies of the world.
The seeds of the Second World War were planted at the end of the First World War.
You can thank Britain and France for that, with Wilson as an accomplice. Saddle the Germans with unbearable debt, and humiliate them. Yes, that will work. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Patton's vision regarding the dangers of the Russians immediately after the defeat of the Third Reich turned out to be well-founded.
Russia, OTOH, hasn't had anything even remotely resembling democracy. Maybe you could argue those brief years after the fall of the USSR, but again that's more of an aberration. Otherwise, one totalitarian regime after another.
BTW, we have a Great Courses Plus subscription. it's a service that lets you stream lectures by professors over a range of topics. I tend towards history, and while I am certainly not a military buff, there's a series of lectures by Gregory S. Aldrete from the University of Wisconsin which I found interesting: https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/professors/gregory-s-aldrete
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It's unfortunate that we didn't let Stalin and Hitler whack each other a bit harder, like Churchill apparently wanted.
The Soviets would have wound up with even more territory in Europe that way. It's I don't think I've ever heard that Churchill wanted that.
A weaker USSR would not have been able to take control of eastern Europe, we might have contained the Soviets at the traditional Russian border.
Of course as long as we're playing what if games... the US should never have entered WWI. Then there would have been no WWII. People talk about going back in time and killing Hitler... Woodrow Wilson is better target. ;D
That's wishful thinking. Germany was finished especially by 1945, but even once the battle for Stalingrad was over.
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Also, I'm not sure what is meant by "aberration" exactly. Was it that Germany became a dictatorship? So did every single new democracy in Central and Eastern Europe with one exception: Czechoslovakia. And this was before things like the Anschlüss with Austria and war with Poland. All those countries reverted to dictatorship on their own. Centuries of autocratic and centralized rule won't translate to effective representational government overnight, and the German people were no exception to that rule. (We're seeing that in Russia as well, right now.)
Was it because of the Holocaust? Genocide is sadly all too prevalent. I can think of half a dozen in the past 50 years, and I'm likely missing others that have happened within that time frame. People who fear those who are different are easily manipulated to take violent action against them, no matter how powerless they are. Something to keep in mind in these times.
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Also, I'm not sure what is meant by "aberration" exactly. Was it that Germany became a dictatorship? So did every single new democracy in Central and Eastern Europe with one exception: Czechoslovakia. And this was before things like the Anschlüss with Austria and war with Poland. All those countries reverted to dictatorship on their own. Centuries of autocratic and centralized rule won't translate to effective representational government overnight, and the German people were no exception to that rule. (We're seeing that in Russia as well, right now.)
The Nazi period in Germany was the aberration.
Eastern European countries became dictatorships after WWII due to the Soviets. They promised "fair elections" of course as the war was winding down, and either FDR believed them, or didn't care.
My previous comments re: Germany and the USSR was with respect to limiting aid to the USSR in the early stages of the war, not in 1945.
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Agreed, Nazi Germany was an aberration. An evil one, of course. By helping them (and Japan) after WWII with massive economic aid, we moved them swiftly to the democracies of the world.
You can thank Britain and France for that, with Wilson as an accomplice. Saddle the Germans with unbearable debt, and humiliate them. Yes, that will work. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
The appeal of the National Socialists (extreme nationalism, blaming outsiders/minorities [Jews, Communists, etc] for the various issues Germany was facing, a strong leader with charisma who told the people what they wanted to hear, etc.) wouldn't have been nearly as powerful if Germany hadn't been in the state it was in in the 10-15 years following the Treaty of Versailles. A geopolitical "perfect storm".
Fear is a powerful emotion and appealing to it produces powerful results. As I said, the Germans weren't (and aren't) that different from Americans in their sensibilities. Both countries have a proud military history as well. If I had to pick one, I would pick the Germans over the Russians any day of the week.
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The Nazi period in Germany was the aberration.
Eastern European countries became dictatorships after WWII due to the Soviets. They promised "fair elections" of course as the war was winding down, and either FDR believed them, or didn't care.
My previous comments re: Germany and the USSR was with respect to limiting aid to the USSR in the early stages of the war, not in 1945.
The remark that the Nazi period was an aberration needs development. I simply don't see it, given human nature and human history.
All those countries became dictatorships on their own between the wars. The ones the Soviets occupied became Communist dictatorships after, but they were all dictatorships before (again, except for Czechoslovakia). They were rightist, but that's not germane here.
As far as limiting aid, are you considering the political realities on the war? Or the risk that Germany could have made themselves much stronger had they taken full control of the natural resources in the Soviet territories that they were after?
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"Stalingrad (the current Volgograd, and the one time Tsaritsyn) is south of Moscow, FWIW, not north."
Sorry, meant Leningrad. And yes Americans and everyone else, including Germans and Japanese were tired of war, but I suspect Patton had worked out the logistics in his head for taking the Russians on so I'll trust his judgement. He also said he'd rather have a German division in front of him than a French one behind him, for some reason. Of course, he seemed to really like war and may have been concerned about the lack of a war to fight after he had been unleashed for years. It may be that Russia would offer a few more years of war glory for Patton where Japan would be over in mere months or weeks.