Great Patriotic War (USSR in World War II)

The audiobook "Icebreaker" is read by the author Viktor Suvorov himself
https://youtu.be/veSwf7OKXN4 it has a segment on the Land-Lease too.
also see https://youtu.be/vQAdArS7G8I

The first is in Russian, the second is banned from Youtube as it might be offensive to some people... the people of the west might get offended if someone says lendlease didn't win WWII on its own.

I hope so... the fight against nazism has not finished yet but remembering those that have fought before is important too.

The core problem I think is that Stalin knew the Brits were hip deep in the shit by 1941 and were essentially fighting Germany on their own and were super desperate to get the Soviets involved on their side fighting against Germany to take some of the pressure of them.

Given this situation, most of the things the Soviets found that suggested to them that Hitler was going to attack the Soviet Union, could have appeared to be British propaganda to try to get the Soviets to take steps to stop a German attack that might not have been coming and therefore provoke a German attack.

A bit like western building up and strengthening against Russia made the Ukraine war inevitable, but the west is so stupid they are now going to repeat the exact same mistake with Taiwan and think building up Taiwan will save Taiwan like their building up the Ukraine didn't save the Ukraine.

In fact their building up and making them strong actually made the Russian invasion of the Ukraine NECESSARY... just like western building up of Taiwan is going to make a Chinese invasion of Taiwan necessary too... but don't try to tell the people who make the decisions because they are getting super wealthy from the conflicts that end up being created.

British duplicity is likely what created caution for Stalin, because there was nothing the British needed more was for the Germans to fight the Soviets... it was a western wet dream... a bit like recent hopes, now dashed that somehow Russia and China might fight each other, so now it has gone to plan B with India and China fighting each other... note how careful the west is to keep out of the Russia Ukraine conflict except to feed ammo and weapons and money to one side to keep it going... that is what they will do with Taiwan vs China or India vs China...

Nothing has changed.

The Soviets knew a war was basically inevitable and had been massively increasing the size of the Red Army prior to 1941. Stalin himself gave a remarkably prescient speech to military cadets where he basically predicted the year the war would start. What you could argue was that after the Germans lost the chance of starting the war in the spring, the Soviets probably expected them to postpone the war at least until 1942. Even when they had intel on the Germans invading on the exact date provided by Richard Sorge for example.

A lot of claims you hear, like that Stalin had a meltdown when the invasion started, are BS. He did several all nighters with constant meetings when the conflict started, and then he had to sleep, figure that.

You also hear a lot of claims, like that the purge of Tukhachevsky rid the Red Army of a brilliant officer, or whatever. When Tukhachevsky  was responsible for the ill fated offensives in the Russo-Polish war and he wasted lots of capital in trying to convert the whole army to use recoilless guns to replace all existing artillery. Which proved to be a major mistake.

They had lots of problems, like that guy in charge of armament who didn't like sub machine guns and despite them having amazing designs at the time the numbers produced stayed low till they fought Finland and found how damn useful they could be.

As I said, I think the British had been playing mind games with the Soviets and the Russians before that for a very long time and the purges themselves show they didn't know who to trust and who they should trust.

You can bet your arse that there would be plenty of Navalnys dropping others in the sht so others got the blame for problems, while others spread false information for their own benefit even when it was just passing the buck.

Such people the Brits would track down and use for their own ends around the world...

So their story was first that Stalin was best friends with Hitler (ie the Rippentrop Molotov agreement... except that was a non aggression pact you have between enemies that do not want to step on each others toes so it is essentially an agreement of sphere of influence rather than a friendship pact... most of Europe had already signed their own agreements with Hitler but that is ignored by the west now), but then that Hitler stabbed them in the back.

There is a documentary series by that guy Oliver Stone which was excellent... it didn't just recount events, it looked into the reasons why... so things like the Soviets approaching the French and the British and even the Poles for security pacts to ensure there was no second world war, but they rejected them and so the only security pact on offer was with Germany that gave them half of Poland... which was actually parts of Russia that Poland stole at the end of WWI anyway.

It was a very thorough doco and well worth watching... it was actually about the history of the US screwing everyone over...

I read on a website about World War II that US General George Patton stated in early 1945 he had the means to capture both Berlin and Prague before the Soviets did but his permission to do this was denied because Roosevelt wanted Stalin to take those cities. Patton was anti communist and didn't believe all the pro Soviet propaganda that emanated from the White House and the OSS.  

I want to know was it possible for the US to defeat the USSR and capture both Germany and Czechoslavkia in 1945? Was the US strong enough or do Americans underestimate the USSR military power? Some Americans reason that the US had the nuclear bomb and could have prevented the Russians from taking over Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe.  




https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=9958

andalusia wrote:I want to know was it possible for the US to defeat the USSR and capture both Germany and Czechoslavkia in 1945? Was the US strong enough or do Americans underestimate the USSR military power? Some Americans reason that the US had the nuclear bomb and could have prevented the Russians from taking over Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe.

The Soviet Union already had their nuclear bomb program operating by then. In case of direct conflict with the US you could bet that the Soviets would have accelerated that program even more than what happened in our timeline.

Also, the US initially had quite limited production and availability of nuclear bombs. They were made in single units. Their mass production only happened much later than 1945. And nuclear bombs had to be delivered by bombers which could be intercepted.

If the western allies really wanted to get to Berlin first they certainly could have, but that would have involved them actually doing more of the fighting, so D Day would have had to have gone ahead in 1943, which means probably rather heavier casualties and a greater risk of failure, but they weren't prepared to take anything like the losses the Soviets were taking so eastern europe was guaranteed to be Soviet occupied.

The state of the Soviet forces in 1945 was rather formidable and I doubt the US and British and other forces could have made better progress than they did... even though the German resistance on the western front was nothing like the resistance on the Eastern front.

With German forces besieging Moscow, Stalin orders the November 7th (Revolution Day) military parade to be staged in Red Square, wanting to strengthen the resolve of the Red Army and boost the morale of the citizens.
The General Secretary of the Communist Party Joseph Stalin delivered a speech in Red Square to the soldiers, who would go into battle immediately after the parade.
Soviet troops marched in front of the Kremlin and then marched straight to the front.

I read on a website about World War II that US General George Patton stated in early 1945 he had the means to capture both Berlin and Prague before the Soviets did but his permission to do this was denied because Roosevelt wanted Stalin to take those cities.

Who would take what was not left down to the whims of leaders at the time, there were negotiations and discussions about who would do what and who would attack where and when.

Stalin didn't take eastern europe and half of germany... the western allies agreed with Stalin as to which places they would take and which not.

The enormous irony is that the west complained that the Soviets didn't withdraw after liberating these countries after the war... irony because the US still has troops all over Europe to this day.

Another thing that annoyed the Soviets... they assumed that when Soviet forces withdrew from eastern europe that the US would reciprocate and withdraw US forces from western europe, but instead US forces advanced towards the Russian border moving into former Soviet republics as well.

The US would not have been able to nuke the Soviets anyway... they didn't have enough bombs and the long slow flight to any worthwhile Soviet targets would have been horribly vulnerable to the Soviet Air Force... and their intel on Soviet cities means they might bomb a city already ravaged by half a decade of conventional bombing... they might not even notice the extra damage... just the radiation would be an added extra.

The Russians meat waves in WW2, 1915 wasn't the last time...but everyone did as that was the standard practice of the time

Westerners are quite stupid in their imagination of Russian soldiers. They are changing. Sometimes they are tossed ants and sometimes they are supermen like Ivan Drago in Rocky. The only thing I can answer to the Americans is that they escaped from Afghanistan from warriors who rode horses and bicycles.

Hitler abandoned the theory of inferior russians in his final days of the war. In fact, he said that the German defeat was deserved and recognized Stalin's merits in clearing the army of saboteurs (not like the one who was betrayed by the Prussian aristocracy).
In Hitler's logic based on racial war and the survival of the fittest, the Russians demonstrated superiority over the Germans and were going to conquer the world and subjugate the weak liberal democracies
And he wasn't wrong. You just have to compare the state of decomposition and mediocrity of modern Germany with the current sovereign Russia.
I always say that Germans should get closer to Russians because they can find inspiration in the Russian spirit and tradition and rebuild their own country. You should be allied peoples.
But well the Germans are being replaced. In a few decades they will no longer exist. They will be a historical relic, a museum where the Russians will travel as the Romans did with the Spartans to learn from their mistakes.

Absolutely wrong there are many many examples of red army meat waves tactics in the fin war and WW2 this is documented from both sides. Historical revision is the saddest of copes.

While it is true some generals of the Germans used this has an excuse when it wasn't always the case.

Also it's technically TRUE that the Germans out numbered the Russians at the start but the Russians also had a much larger pool of men to get new bodies from, the Germans where much more heavily limited in this aspect, the Germans could not afford the losses the Soviets could, double so when they had to worry about two fronts.

This is why they wanted to win the war as fast has possible and historically this shows once etue Soviets got in gear their larger manpower pool and production capabilities simply overwhelmed Germany.

German had better technology then the Russians and this is common knowledge, as stated by the Soviets themselves.

"Quantity has a quality all it's own" there is a reason this is. A well know phrase, doesn't matter if your foe can build a better tank then you when you can just build a decent one and build like 3 for that 1

Historical revision is the saddest of copes.

So stop doing it, the Finns and Germans claimed that the Russians made meat waves and just like the Ukrainians, the Finns and Germans never provided any reliable evidence.

Absolutely wrong there are many many examples of red army meat waves tactics in the fin war and WW2 this is documented from both sides. Historical revision is the saddest of copes.

While it is true some generals of the Germans used this has an excuse when it wasn't always the case.

Also it's technically TRUE that the Germans out numbered the Russians at the start but the Russians also had a much larger pool of men to get new bodies from, the Germans where much more heavily limited in this aspect, the Germans could not afford the losses the Soviets could, double so when they had to worry about two fronts.

This is why they wanted to win the war as fast has possible and historically this shows once etue Soviets got in gear their larger manpower pool and production capabilities simply overwhelmed Germany.

German had better technology then the Russians and this is common knowledge, as stated by the Soviets themselves.

"Quantity has a quality all it's own" there is a reason this is. A well know phrase, doesn't matter if your foe can build a better tank then you when you can just build a decent one and build like 3 for that 1

You sure drank the kool aid. The Germans plus all their allies (Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland, Slovakia, Croatia, etc) outnumbered the Soviet Union in terms of troops in the Eastern Theater during most of the war. To show how they were "outnumbered" the Nazis often just count the German troops vs Soviet troops as if the others didn't exist and weren't there. And even then sometimes they can't make the numbers match up to their claim. This is just plain bullshit on their part.

Even if you go to Wikipedia, which is a pretty biased source, you will find in the Operation Barbarossa page that the German side had 3.8 million personnel, and the Soviet Union 2.6-2.9 million.

The Germans plus their satellites massively outnumbered the Soviet Union. They could count on pretty much the entire continental Western and Central Europe to provide them with manpower to run their industrial machine. This meant they could put much more of their population directly fighting in the armed forces. They had military allies from Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, and Finland. They also had mercenaries from outside their supposed areas of control. For example Spanish, Belgian mercenaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Division
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walloon_Legion

As for Finland the talk about meat wave tactics is pretty much bullshit as well. What happened is that Soviet troops had to follow fairly narrow roads across the ice, and this made them and their logistics vulnerable to be ambushed. The Soviets still won.

The claim about Soviet human waves and superior numbers by the Germans in WW2 just shows how inferior the German command and logistics were actually. The Soviets typically did probing attacks all over the front, and when they found a weakness they concentrated troops and achieved local superiority, despite never having actual superiority in troops. i.e. they just used the troops they did have better. You are seeing the same thing happen in Ukraine today where the Russians can achieve local superiority against a more numerous opponent. And you still don't get it.

As for the Germans having "better technology" it depends on what you are talking about. It certainly wasn't true in terms of tanks. The Soviets had the T-34 and KV-1 when the Germans had the Panzer III, and Panzer IV. And when the Germans got the Panther and Tiger II the Soviets had the T-34-85 and IS-2. The Soviets could have put the T-34M, T-43, T-44 in production to replace the T-34 but they didn't do it to keep the production rate up. The Germans had better fighters than the Soviets for the initial part of the war, and they had worse ground attack aircraft for basically all the war. The Soviets weren't behind on artillery either. In fact the Germans ended up having to make clones of several pieces of Soviet artillery. And that's just with conventional artillery, since the Soviets also were ahead in rocket artillery. In terms of personal weapons the Soviets had better submachine guns, and the Germans had better machine guns.

The main technological advantage the Germans had was better radios and fighters (for the initial part of the war) really.

Mistaken. The Germans had better technology but not to the point of giving them an advantage on the battlefield. Even German military tactics had already been developed by Russian militaries. The Germans underestimated the Russians. Just look at the T34.
Hitler ignored the intelligence reports. I thought the Russians had much less than they did. The poor performance of the Russians in Finland gave a misleading impression of Soviet power.
And to make matters worse, the idiot declares war on the United States on two fronts.
If Hitler had been so anti-Russian and paranoid, today Germany would dominate the world because it would not have had a conflict with Stalin, and if they went to war it would be in a safer scenario for the Germans. He could have even left the Soviets alone and stayed with the Wes, but hey, he was a good domestic politician but very stupid in geopolitics.