Great Patriotic War (USSR in World War II)

DTA wrote:Trophies of the Great Battles (1943)
exhibition

archangelski wrote:

DTA wrote:Trophies of the Great Battles (1943)
exhibition

So much beautiful trophies and so few still visible (especially airplanes).

JohninMK wrote:This was news to me, Russia flying over 700 B-25s in WW11.

Odin of Ossetia wrote:Hello.


I need help from someone with a good knowledge of the Soviet partisans during the Second World War.

There is a book out there (cannot post any links about it since new members cannot do it for the first seven days), titled The Polish Underground 1939-1947 (Campaign Chronicles) authored by David G. Williamson.


I do not know why that author wrote that book, since from its contents it is clear that he knows very little about the Polish Resistance Movement during the Second World War. The book contains factual errors, and a number of amazingly glaring omissions, while at times it covers some trivial incidents in detail.



Here is my problem (one of many with this book), and why I need help here:

The author states in the book that Petro Vershyhora's Soviet partisan raiders during a couple of months of their stay in eastern Poland-proper caused more damage to the Germans and their collaborators than did all the Polish resistance organizations combined since the start of the German occupation in late 1939 in that part of Poland-proper.


The big problem I have with this claim is that it is simply false.



Just to illustrate what I mean (only by a few examples):


1) The GL (People's Guard) alone derailed 194 trains during 1942-1943, a significant portion of these derailments took place in the eastern Poland-proper.

2) Only during a single action carried out in late 1942 the GL partisans freed some 500 (at least one Isreali source states it was 600) Jewish slave laborers from a camp at Janiszow, in the eastern Poland-proper.

3) During the night of 31 December, 1942, - 01 January, 1943, the AK (Army of the Land) and the BCh (Peasant Battalions) launched 60 armed attacks against the Germans and their collaborators in Zamojszczyzna.

4) During the Battle of Zaboreczno fought in early 1943 in Zamojszczyzna the Polish BCh (mostly) & AK partisans killed around 150 armed Germans (over 100 policemen, and at least a few dozens more from the Landwacht), and wounded close to 200 others; the Polish partisans had only one killed.

5) During the first half of 1944 the AL (People's Army) in the District of Lublin delayed the German railway traffic by at least 45 days, according to the most conservative estimates.

6) Only during 1944 the local Polish resistance derailed 26 German trains in the area of Krasnystaw.

7) Over 160 German colonists killed only during one attack carried out in early 1943 on the colonized village of Cieszyn in Zamojszczyzna; Polish partisans had only one killed (mortally wounded).



So if the Soviet partisans of Petro Vershyhora did more, precisely how many Germans, their collaborators, and satellite troops did they kill/wound/capture?

How many trains did they derail?

How many prisoners did they free?



If you do reply and provide any pertinent data, can you also give sources, like books, articles, even links to Internet pages?

I can back up all my claims, but currently cannot post any links for the next seven days.



I have seen a joint Polish-Soviet movie about these Soviet partisans of Vershyhora, its title translated into English is Between the Bug River and Vistula, and it shows them upon their arrival in the eastern Poland-proper as a rather exhausted bunch suffering from serious shortage of ammunition. How come these Soviet partisans could have done anything extraordinary in Poland without any ammunition? That lack of ammunition is repeatedly and very explicitly mentioned in the movie. The only really remarkable thing they did was shelling of some facility with artillery, but then the Polish partisans did not had artillery. The movie also showed that these Soviet partisans needed the help from the local Polish (AK, AL, BCh) partisans in order to survive.


Amazingly this lousy, misleading, and uninformative book received a bunch of flattering reviews at Amazon.

On August 23, 1939 the USSR and Nazi Germany singed a Treaty of Non-aggression, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; the document still triggers fierce debate, prompting the West to accuse the USSR of "colluding" with Hitler on the eve of the Second World War.

Furthermore, since 2008 on this day European countries mark "European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism."

"It's an annual event [August 23], anxiously awaited by western Russophobic propagandists, to remind us of the iniquitous Soviet role in starting World War II. Nowadays of course when the mainstream media say "Soviet," they want you to think about Russia and its president Vladimir Putin. Western "journalists" can't make up their minds about Putin: sometimes he's another Hitler, sometimes another Stalin," Professor Michael Jabara Carley of the University of Montreal emphasizes.

Curiously enough, Western "experts" and mass media remain silent about the fact that most major European powers had signed similar treaties with Adolf Hitler earlier than the Soviet Union did.

The Grand Alliance that Never Was

For instance, Poland, the avowed "victim" of the Soviet-Germany non-aggression pact, had inked a non-aggression treaty with Nazi Germany on January 26, 1934.

"During the 1930s Poland played a spoiler's role. It was a far-right quasi-dictatorship, anti-Semitic and sympathetic to fascism. In 1934, as the USSR raised the alarm about Hitler, Poland signed a non-aggression pact in Berlin. Who stabbed who in the back?" Carley asked rhetorically.

While pointing the finger at the USSR for moving into territories of "Poland" (when no state of Poland existed any longer after German invasion of September 1, 1939) some Western historians are again demonstrating a peculiar form of amnesia, apparently forgetting that these very territories — Western Ukraine and Western Belarus — were annexed by Poland during the Polish-Soviet War (1919 — 1921). The war was unilaterally unleashed by Warsaw against the USSR, torn and devastated by the civil war.

In general, the USSR returned its own territories — with the exception of the small piece of Bukovina — that were grabbed by other European players during the chaos of the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War of the 1920s, Russian historian, politician and diplomat Nataliya Narotchnitskaya noted in her book "Za Chto i S Kem My Voyevali" ("Who We Were Fighting and What For").

"Until 1939, Poland did all it could to sabotage Soviet efforts to build an anti-Nazi alliance, based on the World War I anti-German coalition of France, Britain, Italy, and in 1917 the United States… In 1934-1935, when the USSR sought a mutual assistance pact with France, Poland attempted to obstruct it," Carley emphasized.

But what about Britain and France? Surprisingly, in the 1930s neither London nor Paris hastened to join the USSR's anti-German coalition. Carley pointed to the fact that it was Maksim Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, backed by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, "who first conceived of the 'Grand Alliance' against Hitler." However, "Litvinov's coalition became the Grand Alliance that Never Was."

Historians agree that European conservative elites viewed Adolf Hitler a less "evil" than Soviet Russia. Moreover, according to American economist Guido Giacomo Preparata, for the British and American establishment Nazism was seen as a driving force that could dismantle the USSR, thus far finishing what was started by World War I — complete dissolution of the former Russian Empire.

"To Churchill, [Stanley ]Baldwin [the UK's prime minister] would thus sum it up in July 1936: 'If there is any fighting in Europe to be done, I should like to see the Bolshies [Bolsheviks] and the Nazis doing it'," Preparata wrote in his book "Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich."

Meanwhile European and American elites were not only unwilling to establish any alliances with the Soviet Union, but also poured money into Nazi Germany's economy, facilitating the rise of the Nazi war machine.

Prestigious British arms manufacturer Vickers-Armstrong supplied heavy weaponry to Berlin, while US companies Pratt & Whitney, Douglas, Bendix Aviation, to name but a few, provided German firms — BMW, Siemens and others — with patents, military secrets and state-of-art airplane engines, Preparata pointed out.

The Munich Betrayal of 1938

The final accord of this game was the Munich Agreement signed by the major powers of Europe (Britain, Germany, France, Italy) excluding the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, on September 30, 1938, that permitted Nazi Germany to annex northern and western border regions of Czechoslovakia.

Embarrassingly, British archival documents released in 2013 exposed that the UK not only betrayed Czechoslovakia by allowing Hitler to invade it, but also voluntarily handed over nearly $9 million worth of gold that belonged to Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. The Czechoslovak golden bullions were immediately sent to Hitler in March 1939, when he seized Prague.

The Munich Betrayal of September 29-30, 1938 is the actual date of the beginning of the Second World War, Director of the Center for Russian Studies at the Moscow University for Humanities and the Institute of System Strategic Analysis, historian and publicist Andrei Fursov underscores, citing Churchill's letter to Major Ewal von Kleist, a member of the German resistance group and emissary of the German General Staff, just before Hitler's seizure of Czechoslovakia:

"I am sure that the crossing of the Czechoslovak frontier by German armies or aircraft will bring about a renewal of world war… Such a war once started, would be fought out like the last [WWI] to the bitter end, and one must consider not what might happen in the first few months, but where we should all be at the end of the third or fourth year."

And that is not all. Incredible as it may seem, the British government actually prevented a plot aimed against Adolf Hitler in 1938. A group of German high-ranking military officials planned to arrest Hitler at the moment Nazi Fuhrer ordered the attack on Czechoslovakia. Inexplicably, the British political establishment not only refused to help the resistance but ruined its plans.

In his essay "Finest Hour Regime Change, 1938: Did Chamberlain 'Miss the Bus'?" British author Michael McMenamin narrated: "there is no historical doubt that the German resistance repeatedly warned the British of Hitler's intention to invade Czechoslovakia in September 1938… In response, however, the Chamberlain government took every diplomatic step it could… to undermine Hitler's opposition."

Whatever Chamberlain's motivation was, instead of beating the drums over Hitler's aggression in Europe, on September 28, 1939 he "proposed [Fuhrer] a five-power conference between Britain, Germany, Czechoslovakia, France and Italy, where, Chamberlain assured Hitler, Germany could 'get all essentials without war and without delay'," McMenamin wrote citing official documents, and added that Chamberlain also turned a blind eye to the fact that Germany excluded Czechoslovakia from the conference.

After the four powers agreed to accept German occupation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland before any plebiscite and coerced the Czechs to go along, Chamberlain and Hitler inked the British-German Non-aggression Agreement, the author underscored.

Interestingly enough, Professor Carley narrated that during the Czechoslovak crisis Poland (the would-be "victim" of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) demanded that if "Hitler was to get the Sudeten territories, Poland should have the Teschen district [in Czechoslovakia]. In other words, if Hitler gets his booty, we Poles want ours."

So, who colluded with whom? Who were the betrayers?

Why Is West Demonizing Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?

According to Andrei Fursov, in Munich the four powers created a "proto-NATO bloc" that was actually aimed against the USSR. Czechoslovakia's industrial complex was meant to facilitate the growth of the German military might and ensure its ability to launch a big war against "Bolshies" in the East, in order to extend the German Lebensraum. And European elites were interested in this war, expected to exhaust both Germany and Russia.

In light of this, the only move to undermine this plan and postpone its realization was to conclude a similar non-aggression pact between the USSR and Germany. Furthermore, the delay helped the Soviet Union to accumulate its resources in the face of an inevitable invasion from the West.

Michael Jabara Carley cited Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, who said on October 1, 1939, in an interview to the British national broadcaster that Soviet action "was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace."

Why then is the West making every effort to demonize the Soviet-German Non-aggression Treaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact? Professor Carley noted that it is a vain attempt to white-wash Europe's grave mistakes of the 1930s, namely the incapability (or unwillingness?) to halt the rise of Nazi Germany and to establish an anti-Hitler alliance in the early 1930s.

"These days western governments and their 'inspired' journalists, if one can call them journalists, don't worry about 'tendentious' argument when it comes to blackening the Russian Federation. It's anything goes. Should we let them equate the roles of the USSR and Nazi Germany for starting World War II? Certainly not. It was Hitler who intended war, and the French and British, especially the British, who repeatedly played into his hands, rejecting Soviet proposals for collective security and pressuring France to do the same," Professor Carley stressed.

PapaDragon wrote:

http://www.sputniknews.com/politics/20150823/1026098760/molotov-ribbentrop-pact-untold-story.html

Soviet Union since 1933 tried to put barriers on Germany, found ways to prevent war. Soviet goverment since Hitler came into power understand risks and German politics
In december 1933 Soviet Union offered to Poland to sign a joint declaration about inviolability of Baltic states. This declation was rejected by Warsaw with Berlin support.
In may 1934 France foreign minister Louis Barthou offered treaty of mutual assistance to SU. SU were agreed. So called Eastern Pact must be go after this treaty - multilateral agreement on mutual non-aggression all countries Eastern Europe and the USSR and Germany . Eastern pact again were blocked by Warsaw and Berlin. and Louis Barthou and yugoslavian king Alexsander I were killed by bulgarian (assination planned by Ante Pavelic - again german roots )
France and SU were sighted this treaty in may 1935. Later to this treaty joined Czechoslovakia. Then happend Spanish Civil war. I think all of you know of SU role in support Spainish republic and German support of Franco .
In 17 march 1938 Soviet goverment again made another attempt to establish a system of "collective security" - proposing to convene an internationaltion conference to consider "practical measures against aggression and the danger of a new world massacre." Now it was rejected by London. London politics of Berlin's pacification -well-known.
Neville Chamberlain in letter to king "Germany and England are the two pillars of the European peace and the main pillars against communism" 13 september 1938. It was disaster for Soviet diplomacy. Soviet Union faced with one-by-one with Germany. And remember not only Germany. Local conflict on russian Far East with Japan - battle of Lake Khasan (summer 1938). And nobody knows - will it grown into large war or not?

However, Soviet diplomats continued to attempt to form the anti-Hitler system of "collective security".April 17, 1939 the Soviet Union proposed to Great Britain and France sign an agreement on mutual assistance and to support the countries of Eastern Europe in the event of aggression against them. And only after the failure of the Anglo-French-Soviet talks in the Kremlin, it was decided to ensure security of the Soviet border in treaty with Germany.

And if we want to talk who really support Germany, let return again to 1933 year.
When Germany revocated thier representatives from the Conference on Disarmament, they faced with threat of the use of the League of Nations sanctions against Germany.Warsaw assured Berlin that they will not accepted any sanction against Germany. It was in october 1933.
In december 1933 Poland proposed to Germany to sign anti-soviet pact. But in that time it was too radical even for Hitler .
26 january between Poland and Germany were signed a declaration on the peaceful settlement of disputes and non-use of force. As i mentioted above Poland refuse to sign declation about Baltic States with SU in favour of this declation.
28 september 1938 Poland refused project of Eastern Pact and said t Paris that Warsaw "Now associate their fate with Germany".
When Germany begun to revision of european borders the same action begun and Poland . In march 1938 Poland organized provocations on demarcation line with Lithuania. Poland send an ultimatum,
demanding to officially recognize Vilna area as polish territory - the Polish troops occupied it in 1920 and annexed in 1922. Otherwise Poland threatened by war to Lithuania. This actions had full support in Germany. About Cieszyn Silesia and how Poland shaking hand with Germany divinding Czechoslovakia well-known too.

So Poland must the last coutry crying about Molotov-Ribbentrop pact