Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 Frazzled wrote:
Not true exactly. Stalin had his own pogroms against Jews and other groups purely for existing.

You're gonna have to come up with some sources for that.

 Sir Arun wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Not true exactly. Stalin had his own pogroms against Jews and other groups purely for existing.

You're gonna have to come up with some sources for that.

There's plenty out there. It started back under the Tsarist rule with Alexander III and Nicholas II's policy of 'Russification' (trying to eliminate subcultural identities in favour of being 'Russian'), eased off a bit under Lenin at least initially, but picked back up under Stalin. The Jews, the ethnic/racial/national minorities, anyone who didn't fit in with Stalin's ideal of 'white, atheist, Stalinist Russians' were very heavily persecuted for the entirity of his rule.

Besides, even if it weren't the Jews being persecuted, are you then saying it's not as bad to persecute someone for their political views as for their religious ones?* Stalin enacted terror against anyone not a Stalinist 'just for existing' in the same way Hitler did against the Jews.

*please note I'm not actually accusing you of this, just playing Devil's Advocate.

Well, the Nazis persecuted people for an accident of birth, whereas you can at least change your political views if necessary, so it's not as bad. But both Stalin and Hitler are outliers on the "He was horrible" spectrum, I think we can agree on that.

But Churchill said something on the lines of, if Hitler decided to invade Hell, he would at least make a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

However this is getting a bit off topic.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Well, the Nazis persecuted people for an accident of birth, whereas you can at least change your political views if necessary, so it's not as bad. But both Stalin and Hitler are outliers on the "He was horrible" spectrum, I think we can agree on that.

But Churchill said something on the lines of, if Hitler decided to invade Hell, he would at least make a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

However this is getting a bit off topic.

Stalin persecuted farmers because of an accident at birth. Also Jews and gypsies.
There was a conspiracy argument that Stalin was actually poisoned to avoid another Jewish pogrom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Russia

 Paradigm wrote:
There's plenty out there. It started back under the Tsarist rule with Alexander III and Nicholas II's policy of 'Russification' (trying to eliminate subcultural identities in favour of being 'Russian'), eased off a bit under Lenin at least initially, but picked back up under Stalin. The Jews, the ethnic/racial/national minorities, anyone who didn't fit in with Stalin's ideal of 'white, atheist, Stalinist Russians' were very heavily persecuted for the entirity of his rule.

You're gonna have to be more specific. I know Jewish pogroms were also a thing in Russia throughout history, but can't find sources of this practice continuing under Stalin.

 Paradigm wrote:
Besides, even if it weren't the Jews being persecuted, are you then saying it's not as bad to persecute someone for their political views as for their religious ones?* Stalin enacted terror against anyone not a Stalinist 'just for existing' in the same way Hitler did against the Jews.

What I am saying is that it is not as bad to persecute someone for their political views (which are, at the end of the day, changeable) than for the ethnicity they belong to, which they obviously cannot change. For Anti-Jews, being Jewish is more of an ethnicity thing than a religious thing.

From what I've heard having a Jewish grandparent was enough to have you sent to gas chambers in the Third Reich.

Just finished watching an excellent documentary series called:

Apocalypse - World War II

It's a 6 part French production, with each episode about 45 minutes long, so over 4 hours of footage.

The best thing about it is, it's all recolored WW2 footage, making everything that much more realistic.

Covers pretty much the entire war, doesnt waste time interviewing survivors (which would slow down the pace dramatically), and is instead narrated from start till finish.

 Sir Arun wrote:
Just finished watched an excellent documentary series called:

Apocalypse - World War II

It's a 6 part French production, with each episode about 45 minutes long, so over 4 hours of footage.

The best thing about it is, it's all recolored WW2 footage, making everything that much more realstic.

Covers pretty much the entire war, doesnt waste time interviewing survivors, and is instead narrated from start till finish.

I think I've seen one or two parts of that one, t'was really good.

 sebster wrote:

 George Spiggott wrote:
Poland may have worked if only the Germans attacked. Czechoslovakia on the other hand is unworkable without Soviet aid (which the Poles and French effectively blocked). There was a sizeable German demographic in Czechoslovakia, almost a quarter of the population, which wanted union with Germany and ran through all strata of society. That includes the army.

Poland was utterly defeated before the Russians crossed the border. Seriously, the bulk of the forces had been cut off from communications and supply by an armoured pincer. There was no saving them. Even if they hadn’t put up such an outmoded defence, their divisions were almost all lightly armed infantry, with negligible air power.

The point about the German population in Czechoslovakia is a good one, but I’d take that risk over the Polish army anyday. If nothing else, most of Czechoslovakia fighting for you is better than all of the Czech munitions in service of Germany.

Poland was in no position to win, that was a given from day one and part of Polish policy. The Polish plan is to hang on until the Western allies, specifically France come to it's aid. The French gave up on that idea when they encountered Westwall. However that's not the information the planners have before the war who are unawarre of the secret Nazi-Soviet pact. The Czechs also have a belligerent neighbours, Hungary and Poland, as well as the Slovak separatist movement. There's also the problem of preventing a non-German win turning into a Soviet land grab because the French (as we know from Poland) aren't coming and Britain (lets be super generous and say Britain is really up for military intervention) has no means of deciding the outcome of a war in a landlocked country in central Europe.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
Sebster, I think you're misunderstanding the original point I made.

My original point dealt with the consequences of the fall of France, not British policy in the Far East.

And on your overall point I agree entirely – I’m just nitpicking the details because, you know, this is the internet

I'm arguing that without France's defeat, Japan would not have occupied Indo-China (which allowed them easy access to Malaya, to attack Singapore in the first place)

Amphibious landings and an overland campaign were still likely, and that was recognised by the British. The issue really comes back to a lack of decent air protection.

Also, France's fall encouraged Italy to enter the war with a view to grabbing Britain's African possessions, as the French Navy's role was to guard the Med, whilst the Royal Navy guarded the Atlantic.

The French defeat definitely encouraged Italy to start grabbing what it could (starting with an ineffective attack on France itself in the last days before ceasefire), that’s true.

But then that caused about as many problems for the Germans as it did for the British. Had British troops not been diverted to Greece, Italy could have been routed from Africa before German troops were even called for. But even that blunder was recoverable, if Churchill had appreciated the British strategic position, and strengthened Singapore by reducing the flow of supply to Africa.

But instead Churchill was chasing that decisive win in Africa, pouring in resources that were squandered on a British army that wasn’t really capable of effective offensives against roughly equal German forces at that time. Singapore was left bare and the rest is history.

And of course, if France hadn't fallen, Germany would not have attacked the Soviet Union.

France certainly had to be pacified. I actually doubt many German planners thought that would be achieved through total conquest, but once that happened, well it was more than a nice bonus.

After reading the military history of Germany's invasion of France in 1940, I'm amazed at how many chances the Allies had to stop the Germans. It's all Ifs, but, maybe, but it was a lot closer than people realise.

My own reading is similar. For a long time I saw a lot of it as misfortune, and a lot of it certainly was. But more and more it’s the terrible planning and generally dysfunctional senior command – before the war too many challenges to orthodoxy were ignored. One of the great tragedies of history, really.

Why did the allies land at Normandy?

Why didn't the troops land on the North German coast?

I understand the liberation of France was on high priority, but seriously - consider it. Most of the German Wehrmacht is battling on the Eastern Front. The Germans are anticipating an allied landing at Calais and have some divisions in France and the Benelux.

Allies have complete air superiority and naval superiority all over western and northern Europe. Why not land north of Berlin and take the city in 3 weeks instead of landing in France and grind through a broad front of attrition for a year?

Landing on the coast north of Bremen would make the supply lines from the English coast only about 3x as long as that to Normandy. The invasion fleet was MASSIVE (the largest fleet in human history, according to many), over 1000 ships.

There would be no naval or aerial German power that could challenge that...

 Paradigm wrote:
That's a good set of points, to which I'd add that the Holocaust sticks out in the Western conscience not just because it adds another level of triumph to their victory, but because unlike most genocides on that scale, people did survive and return to society to tell their stories. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of Stalin's victims were either killed instantly or sent to Gulags to work until death; none really got out until much, much later, and even after Stalin's death, the Soviet propaganda machine would be careful about what information was out there.

That's a really good point. Just to add to it, I'd say a lot did survive and even were returned to Soviet society, but that's very different to Holocaust surivors, because the Russians survivors were still part of a closed society. They couldn't write a book of their experiences, and they certainly couldn't go to Hollywood and get a movie made about it.

Ultimately, The Holocaust was a tragedy that lived on in memories and in culture, while The Terror was a set of statistics that was already history by the time anyone other than the perpetrators knew about its true extent. It's really a perception that ought to be changed, but I don't think it will be any time soon.

Yeah. To say nothing of the deaths in China or Cambodia or anywhere else.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sir Arun wrote:
You're gonna have to come up with some sources for that.

While the Orthodox church was never formally banned, in the 1920s the party took control of it, basically with the aim of steadily making it disappear. Church officials who argued against this were executed, about 7,000 in total, and about 95,000 other Christians were killed over the next decade. Then in the 30s Stalin declared his five year plan for atheism, which long story short ended up with another 100,000 executed.

A lot of Jews were murdered during the civil war, but it doesn't make much sense to focus on Soviet murders, because the Whites killed vastly more. That's basically the Jewish lot - war breaks out and sooner or later one faction or the other will turn up in your village and murder some people. After the war as Jewish expression and culture began to flourish, the Stalin saw potential for resistance and over the next 5 years executed a number of Jewish leaders and encouraged a revival of anti-semitism. Nothing like the death toll of Christians, or Jews elsewhere, but it is still direct repression through targeted execution.

I read about the polish being abandoned by the west, and betrayed several times, up to the point when they tried to resist the Russian rule at the end of WW2.

History is written by the victors, even now atrocities and genocide are committed by "allies" in the name of tactical advantages, or just financial profit, are tolerated or just ignored.

 George Spiggott wrote:
Poland was in no position to win, that was a given from day one and part of Polish policy. The Polish plan is to hang on until the Western allies, specifically France come to it's aid. The French gave up on that idea when they encountered Westwall. However that's not the information the planners have before the war who are unawarre of the secret Nazi-Soviet pact. The Czechs also have a belligerent neighbours, Hungary and Poland, as well as the Slovak separatist movement. There's also the problem of preventing a non-German win turning into a Soviet land grab because the French (as we know from Poland) aren't coming and Britain (lets be super generous and say Britain is really up for military intervention) has no means of deciding the outcome of a war in a landlocked country in central Europe.

If Poland had prioritised holding out as long as possible, they wouldn't have pushed a very large portion of their forces in to the Polish corridor, where they were ripe for encirclement. Nor would they have been so thinly spread across the whole of the border. The Polish plan can only really be seen as incoherent, it worried as much about political issues as actual military defence, and the result was a dispersal of forces that was neither capable of holding Gremany at the border, nor fighting for a sustained period.

The other points you raise are valid, but of fairly minor concern compared to actual fighting capability of Czechoslovakia compared to Poland. And if securing the support or neutrality of neighbours was a key issue, shouldn’t Britain have talked to Russia before announcing military support for Poland in the event of German attack?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sir Arun wrote:
Why did the allies land at Normandy?

Why didn't the troops land on the North German coast?

The Allies weren’t going to make a landing at the edge of the range of their fighters, basically. Having a vast armada is great, but without air cover you’re going to lose a lot of ships and sailors.

And not only would the losses to the fleet have been greater, but with the fleet needing to protect itself it’s going to be less free to support the ground troops. Add on that the much reduced presence of fighters and the narrow lines of approach of bombers to support the invasion, and the handful of division put on land in the first few days are going to be largely on their own. Given how important air and naval support was in breaking up German counter attacks in the first few days, and you’ve got real scope for disaster.

 Sir Arun wrote:
Why did the allies land at Normandy?

Why didn't the troops land on the North German coast?

I understand the liberation of France was on high priority, but seriously - consider it. Most of the German Wehrmacht is battling on the Eastern Front. The Germans are anticipating an allied landing at Calais and have some divisions in France and the Benelux.

Allies have complete air superiority and naval superiority all over western and northern Europe. Why not land north of Berlin and take the city in 3 weeks instead of landing in France and grind through a broad front of attrition for a year?

Landing on the coast north of Bremen would make the supply lines from the English coast only about 3x as long as that to Normandy. The invasion fleet was MASSIVE (the largest fleet in human history, according to many), over 1000 ships.


There would be no naval or aerial German power that could challenge that...

In addition to what Sebster said, there's also the fact that Stalin was very eager for Second Front to draw a portion of German manpower away from the advancing Red Army. An attack by Britain/America/Canada in Germany would do that to some extent, but ultimately would culminate in one long front around the German border in the North and East. Meanwhile, landing in France pulls forces to the other side of Europe, trapping and dividing the Germans, frees France, and is also easier, thanks to the shorter route/availability of air support..

The cynic in me says Stalin would have blocked any proposal for the invasion to come further East; he had designs of his own for everything between Russia and Berlin and wouldn't want the Western Allies interfering. The Russian actions of the last years of the war were as much an invasion as a liberation.

The Allies weren’t going to make a landing at the edge of the range of their fighters, basically. Having a vast armada is great, but without air cover you’re going to lose a lot of ships and sailors.

And not only would the losses to the fleet have been greater, but with the fleet needing to protect itself it’s going to be less free to support the ground troops. Add on that the much reduced presence of fighters and the narrow lines of approach of bombers to support the invasion, and the handful of division put on land in the first few days are going to be largely on their own. Given how important air and naval support was in breaking up German counter attacks in the first few days, and you’ve got real scope for disaster.

-The terrain itself is very poor for an invasion with flooding tidal flats. You basically have to invade shield islands and then invade the mainland.
-Its the inverse of the France situation. Germans are close to their areas of support, whereas its the opposite for the allies.

This was heavily discussed here.
http://historum.com/speculative-history/62002-normandy-best-choice.html

Well, there are a lot of scenarios. Some of them have the Axis winning and some of them the Allies.
What if France had actually fought back rather than surrendering? Then the war would never have dragged on as long as it did. The Germans use of the Blitzkrieg tactic was very good and countered the semi static French defence but there was a massive issue to it, namely that Blitzkrieg, as with any lighting assault, requires the upkeep of the momentum of advance. If your opponent can bog you down and remove your momentum then your assault often breaks up and your forces end up broken.
From here it is not difficult for the defenders to follow up your retreat with a rapid advance that can swiftly see them gain ground.
If France had followed this style of bogging the advancing Germans down, breaking the assault and then following up on the retreating foe they would have been able to break the back of the German assault in no time and push right on through the territories captured by the Germans. With the Maginot line on their flank to prevent the German army from flanking them and slipping in behind them and with reinforcements from the British the allied armies would have pushed their way into Berlin within a couple of months.

Alternatively one has to look at what would have happened if the US had not been trading with Germany (indirectly via neutral countries) for the first few years of the way. Deprived of the goods from America it would not have been as easy for the Germans to sustain the war effort as long as they did.
Then there is the Russian front to look at. The German invasion of Russia is, with hindsight, the worst move they ever made. Even without the allied invasion of Normandy Germany would have lost as the Red Army was pushing them back to Berlin without any help needed.
But what if Russia had not reacted fast enough and halted the German invasion? What if they had lost their factories? Then they would not have been able to sustain their war effort. Trapped between the German forces and the Japanese border Russia would have fallen and the only hope the Red Army would have had of surviving as a fighting force would to either split up and become a guerilla army or to break out through the Japanese border and retreat through the far east until they met up with British or French forces.

 sebster wrote:
If Poland had prioritised holding out as long as possible, they wouldn't have pushed a very large portion of their forces in to the Polish corridor, where they were ripe for encirclement. Nor would they have been so thinly spread across the whole of the border. The Polish plan can only really be seen as incoherent, it worried as much about political issues as actual military defence, and the result was a dispersal of forces that was neither capable of holding Gremany at the border, nor fighting for a sustained period.

The other points you raise are valid, but of fairly minor concern compared to actual fighting capability of Czechoslovakia compared to Poland. And if securing the support or neutrality of neighbours was a key issue, shouldn’t Britain have talked to Russia before announcing military support for Poland in the event of German attack?

The dispute with Germany is over the Polish corridor. Nobody knows a two (technically three if you include Slovakia) way invasion of all of Poland is coming. There is no 'actual' fighting capability of Czechoslovakia. You're downplaying serious ethnic divisions in Czechoslovakia that undermine any on paper capabilities of the Czechoslovak armies. Historically the Hungarians and the Poles both helped themselves to Czechoslovak lands. Britain and France have nothing to offer them and they and the Soviets are all geographically isolated.

As for taking to the Soviets it would have taken (and did) a bigger crisis than Czechoslovakia for that to happen.

I found this image on /pol/ and am I bit shocked. Is it just a photo montage made up by tinfoil hat revisionists or how much of it is true?

Can dakka debunk it?

http://i.imgur.com/7evoHXZ.jpg

Source is 4chan and Anonymous says it's the biggest red pill he's had in a while. I'm sold.

There's a serious amount of stupid there to wade through. Are you serious?

I have to say I am quite surprised at how close the Soviet Union had come to joining the Axis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Axis_talks#German_reaction

Were it not for Germany's ideological endgame, chances are the war could have turned out very, very different. For the worse, obviously, since we'd then have a Western Hemisphere of Freedom and the rest of the world would be a totalitarian hellhole.

Of course there's still the American atomic bomb, but with Russia and Germany pooling their scientists together it could have been anyone, really. Scary

 George Spiggott wrote:
The dispute with Germany is over the Polish corridor.

Hence the political decision to prioritise defence there by Poland, which left the army stretched and exposed to encirclement. Again, a political and not military decision, and one that reduced the time Poland could last against Germany alone to a month.

Nobody knows a two (technically three if you include Slovakia) way invasion of all of Poland is coming.

It wasn't known, but it was expected . Britain didn't throw a dart at a globe and figure they'd offer protection to whatever country it landed on.

There is no 'actual' fighting capability of Czechoslovakia. You're downplaying serious ethnic divisions in Czechoslovakia that undermine any on paper capabilities of the Czechoslovak armies. Historically the Hungarians and the Poles both helped themselves to Czechoslovak lands. Britain and France have nothing to offer them and they and the Soviets are all geographically isolated.

And I think you're vastly overplaying the issue of internal friction, or downplaying the importance of modern equipment, or overstating the readiness of the Wehrmacht at the point of the Munich talks, or overstating the political stability of Hitler at that time, or some combination of all those things.

As for taking to the Soviets it would have taken (and did) a bigger crisis than Czechoslovakia for that to happen.

Huh? Negotiations stopped and started throughout the 20s and 30s.

 sebster wrote:
It wasn't known, but it was expected . Britain didn't throw a dart at a globe and figure they'd offer protection to whatever country it landed on.

Not it wasn't expected. The Soviet Nazi agreement is a result of the failure at Munich and a secret. Hitler’s demands on Poland

 sebster wrote:
And I think you're vastly overplaying the issue of internal friction, or downplaying the importance of modern equipment, or overstating the readiness of the Wehrmacht at the point of the Munich talks, or overstating the political stability of Hitler at that time, or some combination of all those things.

Then you simply do not understand the ethnic situation in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. It's not 'what if', it is what actually occurred. As for the 'what if', the Czechoslovaks involved on a war, potentially on two fronts, with nothing in the way of modern armaments that the Poles do not also possess in a much smaller country with a much smaller population with no external support isn't going to go well.

Huh? Negotiations stopped and started throughout the 20s and 30s.

Britain regarded the USSR as a pariah state for most of the 1920s and Poland had an ongoing programme to destabilise the Soviet government and separate the Socialist Republics. I doubt there’s much real intent to use the Soviet Union to support Poland they both believe that the other is occupying their land.