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sean10mm posted:This is what I meant; by most accounts he did a good job as a private first class in the German Army. As a military leader in WWII he was mostly garbage. The party didn't really grow that quickly from the first moment. Hitler joins the DAP in 1919 when membership is under a hundred, while yes by the time of the Munich Putsch he'd drawn in membership of nominally over 20,000, it's hard to say how many of these were committed full-timers (both as party politics during the early 20s was incredibly fluid and also because the early Nazis inflated their records in the style that became standard practice). It should also be pointed out that after that Putsch failed, party membership plummeted (both because the party was officially banned as a result, and also because post-hyperinflation stabilization took some of the wind out of the sails of extremist parties) and didn't recover until the late 1920s. vyelkin posted:That part you can probably attribute primarily to the demagoguery and oratory skills. He was one of the first members of what would become the Nazi Party and one of the big things that attracted people to them at all in the early days were his crazy speeches and ability to connect to a mass audience, so it's understandable that he would take on more and more important roles in the organization since most people who were joining were joining to follow him. Absolutely. Not for nothing did Drexler appoint him to the fledgling party's propaganda section early on (prior to Hitler maneuvering him out of power in 1921, oops). Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Dec 8, 2015 |
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Dec 8, 2015 23:14
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Hitler was originally tasked with infiltrating what was still the DAP on behalf of the Reichswehr but his talking skills made an immediate and strong impression on Dexler and the other goons in charge so they invited him to join. Eventually some members tried to have him kicked out but the leadership realized that they would dead in the water without him and so agreed on his demands to be given full control of the party. Having people like Röhm organizing the SA and Göring helped the party to gain more members and having contacts with the upper echelons of society.
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Dec 8, 2015 23:23
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HerraS posted:Hitler was originally tasked with infiltrating what was still the DAP on behalf of the Reichswehr but his talking skills made an immediate and strong impression on Dexler and the other goons in charge so they invited him to join. Eventually some members tried to have him kicked out but the leadership realized that they would dead in the water without him and so agreed on his demands to be given full control of the party. Having people like Röhm organizing the SA and Göring helped the party to gain more members and having contacts with the upper echelons of society. I gotta say, the way the Reichswehr kept sending guys to infiltrate the DAP only to have them decide they like it and join is among the more laughable elements of the story of the early Nazi party. Some Reichwehr goober: Hmm, we sent Verbindungsmann Hitler to spy on these rightwing curbstomp lowlives in the DAP, and then he decided to sign up! What should we do? *short pause* Some Reichwehr goober: Hauptman Röhm! Get down to Munich and spy on those rightwing curbstomp lowlives in the DAP!
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Dec 8, 2015 23:31
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I sometimes wonder what it was like to have been one of those Wehrmacht generals at the exact moment in '44 when he realized (a) what an catastrophic mistake the war was, (b) the enormity of what he was complicit in, and (c) the inevitable consequences, both for Germany and for him personally. Should have reconsidered your life choices, Herr Feldmarschall. 
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Dec 9, 2015 03:03
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Woolie Wool posted:I sometimes wonder what it was like to have been one of those Wehrmacht generals at the exact moment in '44 when he realized (a) what an catastrophic mistake the war was, (b) the enormity of what he was complicit in, and (c) the inevitable consequences, both for Germany and for him personally. Should have reconsidered your life choices, Herr Feldmarschall. Most had already realized a) by mid-1943 at the latest, and b) by late 1941. As for c), I suppose that depends on each mans' capacity for self-delusion and wishful thinking.
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Dec 9, 2015 03:08
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Woolie Wool posted:I sometimes wonder what it was like to have been one of those Wehrmacht generals at the exact moment in '44 when he realized (a) what an catastrophic mistake the war was, (b) the enormity of what he was complicit in, and (c) the inevitable consequences, both for Germany and for him personally. Should have reconsidered your life choices, Herr Feldmarschall. They knew it by 41 and 42. Easily. I guarantee alcoholism among Wehrmacht Generals skyrocketed right around 41.
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Dec 9, 2015 05:31
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CommieGIR posted:I think his point is: Quote it. You didn't write it. Captain_Maclaine posted:That's what I was trying to suggest, in case he'd just forgotten to tag it correctly or something. Outside of threads featuring Jrod, I try not to jump straight to calling someone a plagiarist without at least asking about it first. Do people really need to quote wiki when they even leave the references to excluded sources? I don't think he was ever trying to pass it off as his own. It's not academia here, I think we can be a little lenient on sources when posting relevant material.
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Dec 9, 2015 07:59
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Lots of members of the general staff argued against pretty much every invasion Hitler wanted to do from the beginning. That doesn't let them off the hook morally for going  "Whelp we tried to talk him out of it, guess we have to go murder everything in Europe now" but from a strictly military point of view a ton of generals thought Hitler's plans were lovely ideas from the word go and told him as much pretty regularly. Which he hated of course.
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Dec 9, 2015 15:47
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Woolie Wool posted:I sometimes wonder what it was like to have been one of those Wehrmacht generals at the exact moment in '44 when he realized (a) what an catastrophic mistake the war was, (b) the enormity of what he was complicit in, and (c) the inevitable consequences, both for Germany and for him personally. Should have reconsidered your life choices, Herr Feldmarschall. Walter Model is the best example of the sort of general who was a murderous rear end in a top hat, but not a Nazi murderous rear end in a top hat. An actual soldier who lasted the whole war, mostly by being just exactly enough of a toady to Hitler to get by at just the exact proper times. At least he ate his gun rather than becoming a slimy Clean Wehrmacht memoir-writer like Guderian. Counterfactual, but there's no way the Western Allies wouldn't have tried to rehabilitate Model and use him for their own ends.
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Dec 10, 2015 03:18
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HerraS posted:Hitler was originally tasked with infiltrating what was still the DAP on behalf of the Reichswehr but his talking skills made an immediate and strong impression on Dexler and the other goons in charge so they invited him to join. Eventually some members tried to have him kicked out but the leadership realized that they would dead in the water without him and so agreed on his demands to be given full control of the party. Having people like Röhm organizing the SA and Göring helped the party to gain more members and having contacts with the upper echelons of society. No, we didn't do Hitler. There wasn't even an internet then!
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Dec 10, 2015 04:30
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HootTheOwl posted:we did Hitler mods knew
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Dec 10, 2015 05:54
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cheerfullydrab posted:Walter Model is the best example of the sort of general who was a murderous rear end in a top hat, but not a Nazi murderous rear end in a top hat. An actual soldier who lasted the whole war, mostly by being just exactly enough of a toady to Hitler to get by at just the exact proper times. At least he ate his gun rather than becoming a slimy Clean Wehrmacht memoir-writer like Guderian. Counterfactual, but there's no way the Western Allies wouldn't have tried to rehabilitate Model and use him for their own ends. Thinking about various Nazi German military leaders and their often karma-deficient ultimate fates makes me also think there are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of those sorts of people in every Western country, especially in America. There are Josef Blosches in American military and CIA interrogation sites laughing as a dog rear end-fucks some guy whose only crime was failing to pay his loan shark on time, so the lender denounced him to the coalition as a terrorist. There are vulgar populists ready to step into the shoes of Kool-Aid drinkers like Ernst Röhm and the Strasser brothers, to be used and them disposed of when a future fascist movement gains the high society connections that make such stooges unnecessary. There are untold thousands of upright bible-believin' Are Troops waiting for a führer. They're here. They're everywhere. They were everywhere the whole time during the flowering of liberalism after World War II. Surviving. Regrouping. Waiting for the stars to be right again. It's terrifying.  The FedEx guy who comes by my workplace to pick up the outgoing merchandise was telling me how he thought the Spartans would handle ISIS (tl;dr: they kill all Muslims everywhere). Of course he's a veteran. This is military culture. This is what it stands for. This is 'MERICA. God help us all.
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Dec 10, 2015 07:10
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Woolie Wool posted:The FedEx guy who comes by my workplace to pick up the outgoing merchandise was telling me how he thought the Spartans would handle ISIS (tl;dr: they kill all Muslims everywhere). Of course he's a veteran. This is military culture. This is what it stands for. This is 'MERICA. God help us all. ISIS driving a VBID right up into the pass in Thermopylae would be the best.
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Dec 10, 2015 08:54
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Woolie Wool posted:The FedEx guy who comes by my workplace to pick up the outgoing merchandise was telling me how he thought the Spartans would handle ISIS Die to a man and then have a bunch of pantywaist democrats in boats bail out their kingdom?
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Dec 10, 2015 09:59
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sean10mm posted:Lots of members of the general staff argued against pretty much every invasion Hitler wanted to do from the beginning. So, let me put it this way- there was indeed an anti-nazi resistance within the German armed forces, but it was nowhere near as strong as it was made out to be, and almost all of them died near the end of the war. A lot of officers made up coup and assassination plots in their memoirs to improve their standing in the West. I think the 1930s coup plots fall firmly in the latter. Stauffenberg's coup was unsuccessful because the anti-Nazi faction in the army was far too weak for the deception to have any chance of success. A bunch of coups waiting in the wings until every Hitler miraculous victory is a fabrication by officers who survived the war or people who wanted to rehabilitate the German officers from WW2.
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Dec 10, 2015 13:37
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I'm willing to believe the Czechoslovakia coup because a three-front war against the Czechs, the Poles, and the Franco-British alliance would have been so disastrous for Germany that I can see the generals trying to assassinate him to save their own asses. Also because it's not like that makes them look good, it's not like they cared about any of the people he was planning to kill, they just cared that he wouldn't succeed and would drag them down with him.
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Dec 10, 2015 13:42
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Panzeh posted:So, let me put it this way- there was indeed an anti-nazi resistance within the German armed forces, but it was nowhere near as strong as it was made out to be, and almost all of them died near the end of the war. A lot of officers made up coup and assassination plots in their memoirs to improve their standing in the West. I think the 1930s coup plots fall firmly in the latter. Stauffenberg's coup was unsuccessful because the anti-Nazi faction in the army was far too weak for the deception to have any chance of success. That and half of the coups were "Hitler is making us look bad" and "He's gonna cause another World War 1 style defeat"
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Dec 10, 2015 15:15
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HerraS posted:Please do not put the Bengalese famine caused by incompetence that the british (incompetently) tried to battle on the same list as the loving holocaust and holodomor gently caress the British Empire
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Dec 10, 2015 15:46
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Panzeh posted:So, let me put it this way- there was indeed an anti-nazi resistance within the German armed forces, but it was nowhere near as strong as it was made out to be, and almost all of them died near the end of the war. A lot of officers made up coup and assassination plots in their memoirs to improve their standing in the West. I think the 1930s coup plots fall firmly in the latter. Stauffenberg's coup was unsuccessful because the anti-Nazi faction in the army was far too weak for the deception to have any chance of success. It's also very important to note that for the majority of the anti-Hitler plotters, it was not that they opposed things like the deportations and mistreatment of Eastern Europeans but that they thought Germany was going to be brought down by the Nazis and that they wanted to burn everyone along with them. The German military was pretty much totally on board with Hitler until things started going really badly in the East, which is why the July 20 plot happens 3 years after the initial invasion of the USSR and not when the Einsatzgruppen are shooting people in the Baltic states. Hitler has been a great boon for the German military and had funded them to the hilt as well as leading to victories over the Czechs and French, so they were pretty much willing to do whatever he wanted by 1941. But once he started losing the war he started losing the generals too.
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Dec 10, 2015 16:05
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VitalSigns posted:I'm willing to believe the Czechoslovakia coup because a three-front war against the Czechs, the Poles, and the Franco-British alliance would have been so disastrous for Germany that I can see the generals trying to assassinate him to save their own asses. Just wanna point out here that Poland wasn't going to do a loving thing if Czechoslovakia got invaded by Germany, telling the french to gently caress off when they tried to suggest it and that they would stop any Soviet attempt to send help to the czechs.
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Dec 10, 2015 18:22
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HerraS posted:Just wanna point out here that Poland wasn't going to do a loving thing if Czechoslovakia got invaded by Germany, telling the french to gently caress off when they tried to suggest it and that they would stop any Soviet attempt to send help to the czechs. Oh yeah I forgot about that, but to be fair to Poland they had good reason to think that if they let Red Army troops back on their territory, they wouldn't leave again willingly.
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Dec 10, 2015 18:40
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Panzeh posted:So, let me put it this way- there was indeed an anti-nazi resistance within the German armed forces, but it was nowhere near as strong as it was made out to be, and almost all of them died near the end of the war. A lot of officers made up coup and assassination plots in their memoirs to improve their standing in the West. I think the 1930s coup plots fall firmly in the latter. Stauffenberg's coup was unsuccessful because the anti-Nazi faction in the army was far too weak for the deception to have any chance of success. Pretty much, though I think a fair amount of it was incompetence and disorganization too. A lot of people hated Hitler for a lot of reasons but not much came of it. Regardless I'm not sticking up for the German military establishment as a whole; it's basically the difference between saying they were all poo poo and saying 99% were poo poo. E: I guess I don't get the impulse to bury the tiny fraction of people who weren't complete fucks is all. sean10mm fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 18:45
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HerraS posted:Just wanna point out here that Poland wasn't going to do a loving thing if Czechoslovakia got invaded by Germany, telling the french to gently caress off when they tried to suggest it and that they would stop any Soviet attempt to send help to the czechs. Not to mention that Poland also got in on the whole "let's carve up Czechoslovakia" action. VitalSigns posted:Oh yeah I forgot about that, but to be fair to Poland they had good reason to think that if they let Red Army troops back on their territory, they wouldn't leave again willingly. Nah, in this case it was sheer opportunistic irredentism that was at play.
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Dec 10, 2015 18:52
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Cerebral Bore posted:Nah, in this case it was sheer opportunistic irredentism that was at play. Yeah but afterwards Poland kept refusing a military pact with the Soviet Union and it scuttled any chance at a Franco-Russian alliance to encircle Germany.
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Dec 10, 2015 19:01
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From the perspective of Western Europe in 1938, containing the USSR was just as important as containing the Nazis. They hated communism and weren't going to give Russia anything until the Nazis overran the West all the way to the Pyrenees.
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Dec 10, 2015 19:07
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah but afterwards Poland kept refusing a military pact with the Soviet Union and it scuttled any chance at a Franco-Russian alliance to encircle Germany. Pretending there was no bad blood between the Poles and Soviets ignores, well, a whole goddamn lot that went down in the 1920s.
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Dec 10, 2015 19:08
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah but afterwards Poland kept refusing a military pact with the Soviet Union and it scuttled any chance at a Franco-Russian alliance to encircle Germany. haha yeah Im sure the USSR had no ulterior motives to moving through Poland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact
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Dec 10, 2015 20:47
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LeoMarr posted:haha yeah Im sure the USSR had no ulterior motives to moving through Poland. That's a bit unfair since Molotov-Ribbentrop was a direct result of the Munich Agreement.
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Dec 10, 2015 21:09
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Pretending there was no bad blood between the Poles and Soviets ignores, well, a whole goddamn lot that went down in the 1920s. And a couple of centuries prior to that. Why it's almost as if Poland had previously experienced Russia seizing land in some kind of partitions.
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Dec 10, 2015 21:09
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Anosmoman posted:And a couple of centuries prior to that. Why it's almost as if Poland had previously experienced Russia seizing land in some kind of partitions. I used "Soviets" rather than "Russians" intentionally, to try to keep the discussion closer to the events to hand rather than risk a(n admittedly interesting) derail into the centuries of what I'll politely call "contentious" history between the Poles and Russians.
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Dec 10, 2015 21:29
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You can't do that. The centuries of Russian colonization and its aftereffects dominated politics in the region. The Soviet Union was a continuation of the Russian Empire under new management as much as it was a communist state. IIRC Poland even wanted an alliance with Nazi Germany against Russia. You can't take the 1930s or any other period out of context. E: Poland also had a fascist government at the time and France had an active, powerful fascist movement of its own.
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Dec 10, 2015 21:46
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Cerebral Bore posted:That's a bit unfair since Molotov-Ribbentrop was a direct result of the Munich Agreement. Well yes, however this pact was very favorable to the USSR in terms of sticking it to Poland. Just because Munich was the cause of the treaty does not mean that it was not well within Stalin's desires to take half of Poland. And with the M-R Pact the Allies had no countries between Germany and USSR to prop up and utilize for containment. Which of course helped the USSR by forcing the allies to smash Germany (A capitalist country.) to contain the USSR. Which would give Stalin the ability to sweep through Europe and annihilate the remnants of the Allies/Germany with like 5 million troops (Mobilized in '39) I've been researching a theory that the Allies initiated D-Day as a response to the very real threat of the USSR replacing Germany for control of continental europe. However Operation Dragoon occurring caused Stalin to take control of most of the Balkans, which was a real blunder, Had Dragoon not occured I do believe we would have seen a real Operation Unthinkable. Or a really contained non-threat Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dragoon WAR CRIME GIGOLO fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 21:51
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LeoMarr posted:Well yes, however this pact was very favorable to the USSR in terms of sticking it to Poland. Just because Munich was the cause of the treaty does not mean that it was not well within Stalin's desires to take half of Poland. And with the M-R Pact the Allies had no countries between Germany and USSR to prop up and utilize for containment. Which of course helped the USSR by forcing the allies to smash Germany (A capitalist country.) to contain the USSR. Which would give Stalin the ability to sweep through Europe and annihilate the remnants of the Allies/Germany with like 5 million troops (Mobilized in '39) Stalin didn't give a poo poo about Poland, he gave a poo poo about Germany and the westerm powers teaming up to crush the USSR. In fact, this was the situation that the entire Soviet political-military elite had been preparing for for decades at that point. M-R let him nip that possibility in the bud as well as extend his buffer zone towards Germany, so of course he took the deal. This wasn't some calculated mater plan for world domination, it was sheer opportunism. LeoMarr posted:I've been researching a theory that the Allies initiated D-Day as a response to the very real threat of the USSR replacing Germany for control of continental europe. However Operation Dragoon occurring caused Stalin to take control of most of the Balkans, which was a real blunder, Had Dragoon not occured I do believe we would have seen a real Operation Unthinkable. Or a really contained non-threat Russia. The allies initiated D-Day because Stalin had been demanding a second front for years at that point, so your theory makes no sense whatsoever. Like, the only way it could be halfway reconciled with reality is if the entire historical record WRT inter-allied diplomacy of WW2 has been falsified, so I think you're pretty far into conspiracy theory territory here.
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Dec 10, 2015 22:06
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Soviet help to Czechoslovakia was physically very much possible even without a Polish assistance, but the diplomatic arrangements between Czechoslovakia, France and the USSR postulated that the Soviet Union was allowed to intervene only on Czechoslovakia's request, and even then only after France had also agreed to honour her alliance with Czechoslovakia. Obviously it would have taken time for the Soviets to move into Czechoslovakia in force, so Soviet diplomats headed by Maxim Litvinov spent 1938 trying to convince France to do her necessary part in unblocking the Soviet participation in dealing with Germany. That never happened. Due to diplomatic delays and cautiousness of the Czechoslovak government the Soviets only ever proceeded with deliveries of bomber planes to Czechoslovakia (about 60 reached the country and 200 were planned to be produced locally). Finally in September 1938 the Soviets ultimately showed willingness to go into war even in absence of a French commitment, stating through Litvinov and ambassador Alexandrovskij that a formal accusation made against Germany in the League of Nations by the Czechs in case of armed hostilities would be enough to give the USSR a legitimate reason to start dispatching help. Litvinov also stated categorically that "a corridor [to get aid to CSR] will be found". Arguably the Russians could have used air-drops to live up to their word, their air lift capabilities were tested and sufficient to transport and para-drop entire brigades with heavy weapons into field conditions - and at least four brigades equipped and trained for air-drops were within reach of Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich. After all Czechoslovak military attaches were invited to work with Soviet commanders in the years prior to 1938 on practical demonstrations of the Soviet para-troops doctrine. Romania agreed to allow an unlimited number of Soviet planes (as well as 100,000 ground troops) to cross its territory in mid-September 1938. Finally, in August Air Force gen. Fajfr signed an agreement that Czechoslovakia would accommodate 700 Soviet war planes in the event of a war, and Soviet military consultants were in Czechoslovakia specifically to provide help with air force logistics, evaluating existing airfields and scouting spots for possible improvised air strips. About Poland's role - Czechoslovakia's president E. Beneš actually expected, and quite rightly so, in my opinion, that Poland would be more likely to actually intervene alongside Germany against Czechoslovakia than to stand against Hitler, so in his plans of a 1938 war against Hitler, the USSR played an important role not only providing direct support, but also keeping Poland out of the war. In fact on September 23, a week before the Munich Agreement was signed, the Soviet government delivered a note to Poland stating that any pursuit of territorial claims against Czechoslovakia would lead to voiding the Soviet-Polish non-aggression treaty. Finally consider that on the fateful day of September 30 Czechoslovakia had 34 fully equipped divisions to Germany's 36. In my opinion enough to give the Soviets / a Western response / an German coup plenty of time to ruin Hitler's plans. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 22:08
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Cerebral Bore posted:Stalin didn't give a poo poo about Poland, he gave a poo poo about Germany and the westerm powers teaming up to crush the USSR. In fact, this was the situation that the entire Soviet political-military elite had been preparing for for decades at that point. M-R let him nip that possibility in the bud as well as extend his buffer zone towards Germany, so of course he took the deal. This wasn't some calculated mater plan for world domination, it was sheer opportunism. Stalin's August 19th 1939 Speech directly stated that he wished for the capitalist countries to fight each other and exhaust each other enough to sweep through Europe. On September 1st Stalin began mobilizing his army by reducing the USSR's military age from 21 to 18, and then enacting a universal draft, which increased the soviet army from 1,900,000 to ~23 Million (5Mil Mobilized/18Mil Reserve) (From 1939 - 1941) So if France was occupied in 1940, why did Stalin continue to mobilize an offensive force and not a defensive one until the invasion of the USSR by Germany in 1941? Stalin desired the capitalist countries to fight each other, which correlates into your second point. The allies didn't initiate D-Day because Stalin asked for a second front. They initiated Operation Torch because Operation SledgeHammer "would probably be disastrous". A second front was desired to exhaust Germany and the UK-US by having them fight each other, which was kind of true if you think about the balkans and how rapidly Stalin ate it. Cerebral Bore posted:The allies initiated D-Day because Stalin had been demanding a second front for years at that point, so your theory makes no sense whatsoever. Like, the only way it could be halfway reconciled with reality is if the entire historical record WRT inter-allied diplomacy of WW2 has been falsified, so I think you're pretty far into conspiracy theory territory here. WAR CRIME GIGOLO fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 23:07
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LeoMarr posted:Stalin's August 19th 1939 Speech directly stated that he wished for the capitalist countries to fight each other and exhaust each other enough to sweep through Europe. On September 1st Stalin began mobilizing his army by reducing the USSR's military age from 21 to 18, and then enacting a universal draft, which increased the soviet army from 1,900,000 to ~23 Million (5Mil Mobilized/18Mil Reserve) (From 1939 - 1941) I don't think you are in disagreement? i think you are both fundamentally saying Stalin's wish was primarily to prevent the capitalist Allies from directing the inevitable European war against Russia (he saw appeasement as exactly that, a plot to turn Hitler's obvious bloodlust to the East), instead trying to compel Germany to turn against France first. The fact that Germany and West would weaken each other in such a war, opening space for Soviet intervention and continental dominance was an extension of that. The Soviet military was molded to fit the long term strategy described by LeoMarr, while the MR Pact was an opportunistic move to safeguard a key variable in the strategy, Germany staying out of the Allied club. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 23:16
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LeoMarr posted:The allies didn't initiate D-Day because Stalin asked for a second front. They initiated Operation Torch because Operation Sledgehammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sledgehammer What the gently caress does this mean?
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Dec 10, 2015 23:19
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Obdicut posted:What the gently caress does this mean? I think he meant to say that Torch was carried out because the Anglo-Americans ruled the earlier Sledgehammer plans to be impractical in the wake of the failed Dieppe raid, and so instead tried for an ersatz-Second Front in North Africa (both for practical reasons and also due to Churchill's mania for peripheral attacks).
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Dec 10, 2015 23:23
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LeoMarr posted:Stalin's August 19th 1939 Speech directly stated that he wished for the capitalist countries to fight each other and exhaust each other enough to sweep through Europe. On September 1st Stalin began mobilizing his army by reducing the USSR's military age from 21 to 18, and then enacting a universal draft, which increased the soviet army from 1,900,000 to ~23 Million (5Mil Mobilized/18Mil Reserve) (From 1939 - 1941) I can't make heads or tails of what you're trying to say here. The only thing I can conclude is that you seem to be very confused about how WW2-era militaries work because you claim that mobilizing your military forces while surrounded by hostile powers and while two huge-rear end wars are going on in the neighbourhood is indicative of some kind of master plan for world conquest rather than a reasonable precaution. Captain_Maclaine posted:I think he meant to say that Torch was carried out because the Anglo-Americans ruled the earlier Sledgehammer plans to be impractical in the wake of the failed Dieppe raid, and so instead tried for an ersatz-Second Front in North Africa (both for practical reasons and also due to Churchill's mania for peripheral attacks). That doesn't exactly support his earlier claims, though.
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Dec 10, 2015 23:28
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cheerfullydrab posted:Herein we talk about World War 2, an event many people believe was the hinge between the world of today and the world of yesterday. My favorite topic as Austrian  Overy writes in "Russia's War" that by the time of Stalingrad only 5% of the soviet military vehicle park came from imported stock. So when lend lease really went into effect in late 42 and early 43, the USSR had already won two important victories, namely the battle of Moscow and the battle of Stalingrad. I think that later in the war the deep operation strategy would not have been possible without US resources and especially the enormous amounts of raw materials and trucks. Without those the Red Army would have been a much less mobile force and the war might have ended in some bitter peace along the borders of Poland or so, but that is not set in stone. In terms of damage Japan had already seen worse, like the fire bombing of their major cities which burned like cinder, due to the construction materials used. But it must have had an incredible psychological impact, when all of a sudden a single bomber could do what required a huge air fleet before. Combine this with the Soviets sweeping into Manchuria and effortlessly brushing the Kwantung army (which had still looked strong on paper) aside and you have a series of shock effects. Definitely, since it exposed the underbelly of Europe and the military disasters endangered Mussolini's position at home. The Italian army got beaten hard in North Africa and Ethiopia, losing hundred thousands of men. It also distracted much needed German forces away from the war in the east and was a logistical nightmare for the Axis which lost tons of supplies to the British fleet and to planes from Malta. I don't think so, Pearl Harbor was fresh in the minds of the public and the loss of a fleet would not have deterred the US as a nation. Even if the result of Midway had been flipped the US would have made up it's losses by late 43 with new carriers. Also occupying Midway would not really have strengthened the Japanese offensive position in the central Pacific. Pearl Harbor was an unassailable fortress by that time, so Midway had no value as jump-off point. And for a major base Midway was to small. However, with their core fleet intact Japan would have had several strategic options for another year, at least until the US can catch up in naval strength again.
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Dec 10, 2015 23:30
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