It's very much relevant if you are discussing their ability to take on Germany. The War was being fought in 1939. That means America (if they were as engaged as is alleged) would have had to participate in 39.

There were no 'Five years" either as America's involvement didn't really begin til 42 and little of that involved Germany. They declared War on Japan and fought most their fight in the Pacific.

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The FDR was deceived by the Japanese. He really did not want a war with Japan at all. Pearl Harbor changed everything. And you are right about the state of the American military at the onset of WWII is irrelevant. It hardened the souls and will of the American people like nothing else ever has and unleashed the sleeping giant that the leader of the Japanese attack forces on Pearl stated after the attack occurred.

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An Ode to the Texas man who shot an Antifa terrorist:

Oh, he might have went on livin'
But he made one fatal slip
When he tried to match the Ranger
With the big iron on his hip

I am talking about his other comments regarding WFR. He insulted him and called him ignorant. I was referring to that not your argument with him.

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An Ode to the Texas man who shot an Antifa terrorist:

Oh, he might have went on livin'
But he made one fatal slip
When he tried to match the Ranger
With the big iron on his hip

Why do you want to know? Have you ever served in the military and been in combat?

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An Ode to the Texas man who shot an Antifa terrorist:

Oh, he might have went on livin'
But he made one fatal slip
When he tried to match the Ranger
With the big iron on his hip

The fact is that there were other people involved in the discussion regarding WWII than you and LTG and that discussion was going on fine and civil until LTG attacked WFR and started his usual shit. He always does this shit with people.

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An Ode to the Texas man who shot an Antifa terrorist:

Oh, he might have went on livin'
But he made one fatal slip
When he tried to match the Ranger
With the big iron on his hip

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If you're going through hell, keep going!

"It's called the American dream, because you'd have to be asleep to believe it" - George Carlin

Once again a post that I sent to LTG got deleted in which I chastised him for his calling Japan a "paper tiger" in WWII and as such really insulted our US veterans who fought against a very strong and powerful military during WWII. Once again, no profanity nor anything racist. Just a person's opinion and right on point. Once again, someone on this board has to power to delete posts whenever they choose to. LTG really is a protected soul on this board. He starts shit like he did on this thread and his benefactor helps him.

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An Ode to the Texas man who shot an Antifa terrorist:

Oh, he might have went on livin'
But he made one fatal slip
When he tried to match the Ranger
With the big iron on his hip

I'd say that the graves that line the cemetery in Normandy among others would tell a different story.

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An Ode to the Texas man who shot an Antifa terrorist:

Oh, he might have went on livin'
But he made one fatal slip
When he tried to match the Ranger
With the big iron on his hip

Was it not for the Royal Navy and USN then Germany would've been able to get all the oil they ever would have needed from Iraq (Axis aligned, people tend to forget this) and pretty easily won the war in the east. Everyone likes to think of the blitzkrieg as a giant mechanised assault across an entire line but the reality is that once outside the outstanding German rail network their chief method of supplying the front lines was horses. Consider they were on a front over a thousand miles from Germany, and well that's what did them in.

War is logistics. Its not sexy, but that's the way it is.

Absolutely. The old adage that an army travels on its stomach is 100% correct. Hitler's control of the strategy of WWII was a major help to the allies in defeating him.

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An Ode to the Texas man who shot an Antifa terrorist:

Oh, he might have went on livin'
But he made one fatal slip
When he tried to match the Ranger
With the big iron on his hip

I just want to say that LTG and Darksides knowledge of WW2 history is quite impressive and this has been an enjoying read. Please continue. I have always loved history. Would love to see other historical events discussed in such a manner as well. Kudos to you guys

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Yeah that's my area RFDC. I love history. He knows his WW2 stuff too.

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Yep.

Great thread today.

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Yeah it quite evident. Please continue.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

This is half true. It was a factor but it was not the decisive factor.

Manpower is not really a war winning resource. It can be a war losing resource when one side runs out, but even that has failed to be the case on a few notable occasions (France in the Great War, for instance). Truly, if manpower were so valuable to the Soviet war effort, why was so much of it thrown away? The Battle of Kiev during Barborossa was the largest military encirclement in history (still is, yes even larger than Operation Uranus) and it was complete allowed by the highest level of Soviet command. Seven hundred thousand casualties there. Same goes for Odessa, no retreat allowed.

Even at Smolensk the Soviets traded even more men than they lost at Kiev and Odessa just to buy themselves a month of time.

And lets make no mention of how many Soviet casualties in World War II were absolutely self-inflicted. Statistics for this will never exist, but we know it was not an insignificant number. The Soviets themselves clearly did not value manpower as a decisive resource to win the war. Germany on the other hand did, and went to great lengths to preserve that resource. See how that turned out for them? Not great. All their equipment ran out of fuel anyways.

If Darko or someone that really is interested in discussing it jumps in then I will.

To me America's role and impact in that war was always vastly overstated. A number of historians agree with that too.

FDR had to be pushed kicking and screaming in order to get in the War. The American public was mostly isolationist too. They had no stomach for it as the throes of the Great Depression had ravaged the spirit and whatever stomach for War that we may have had. Pearl Harbor changed all of that.

The Third Reich was the strongest military power on earth at the start of the war. Mostly because Hitler had gearing up for War since about 35 while everyone else around the world was trying to get out of the Depression.

His economy wasn't particularly strong but his military was as it was geared for war. He was on a war economy long before everyone else was.

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To illustrate just how much of disparity in the contributions of the Russians as opposed to the U.S. one should consider this.

Unfairly or not, the current tensions obscure the scale of what's being commemorated: Starting in 1941, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and played perhaps the most important role in the Allies' defeat of Hitler. By one calculation, for every single American soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same.

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That's what Grant understood about war.

The point about horses is totes true too. Everyone talks about the Russian winter--yeah, it was a killer--but the Russian muddy spring stopped the Wehrmacht as much as anything else.

Their Panzers also proved unworthy against the T-34; the Ruskies also had better rifles. The T-34s were designed better and, if I understand it correctly, the Kraut rifles were designed ok but the production sucked. It's weird, because no one in their right mind, if you compare German brains to Russian brains, would ever, ever pick the Russians.

Also, top notch job by the Reds fighting the Japanese. Good job, fellas, declaring war on them in August of 1945. The Russians lost almost every war they fought in for two hundred years prior to the Great Patriotic War. Even the not-yet-industrialized Japanese bitch-slapped them.

But they did come through at an enormous cost in WWII. Thanks to the USSR for taking one for the team, but anyone who overlooks the American contribution--both to the war in Europe and the Pacific and to stopping the eventual enemy, the Russians--is crazy.

That's partially because Russia was governed by dumb, dumb people. It was a backwards nation.

They also had home field disadvantage. I suggest the Ruskies invest in another ocean.

Stop.

American involvement happened long before we officially declared war. The lend lease act was the first real involvement in the war, beginning 7 months prior to an official declaration of war. 50 billion in aid. Technically we could argue the us was aiding in the war effort from 1939 on, as the cash and carry act sold "nonmilitary" aid. Nonmilitary was pretty nebulous as it was largely things needed to make military equipment and to feed the military. This was the real ramp up of american production.
I say the state of the military in 1940 is irrelevant because that's not part of the debate. We're discussing whether the Americans could have held out or defeated germany without russian intervention and i postulate yes they could have but certainly not on the same time scale. The americans had the capacity to manufacture that was completely unprecedented and unmatched anywhere in europe. All the axis powers were seeing declines in all relevant inventories while the united states was seeing increases.
And the real chestnut, we had the Manhattan project.
The war was won 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, whether anyone knew it or not.
Let's not ever say that the Russians didnt help. God yes they did. More than half of Hitler's army was fucking around kn the eastern front, and the Russians ate a lot of the shit that Germany had to serve, and they had seconds and thirds.
God bless them. They kicked a lot of ass. And their contributions should not be diminished.


Edit... words.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

No I'm not and my Grandfather fought in that war so before all of the pseudo patriotism crap starts everyone else needs to stop. My Dad fought in Korea too.

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For the record, Nikita Khrushchev absolutely believed the involvement of the US and specifically Lend Lease made it possible for the Russians to win the war. He had written in his memoirs that Stalin and he agreed upon this.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

See what I mean by overstated?

But the question of how much this aid affected the outcome of the war would become important not only for historians, but as a matter of national pride, as the Soviet Union went on to diminish Lend-Lease’s role in helping turn the tide of battle. Western historians would, perhaps for similar reasons, overstate the role of the aid in Soviet success.

The reality was a bit more complicated — and perhaps inconclusive. Most likely, the Soviets would have won regardless, as the Eastern Front for the Germans was unwinnable after the Battle of Stalingrad, before most of the aid to the USSR arrived. But Lend-Lease also certainly helped shorten the war and saved lives.

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Here's Khrushchevs thoughts on it, along with what he says is stalins...

I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin's views on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were "discussing freely" among ourselves. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure, and we would have lost the war. No one ever discussed this subject officially, and I don't think Stalin left any written evidence of his opinion, but I will state here that several times in conversations with me he noted that these were the actual circumstances. He never made a special point of holding a conversation on the subject, but when we were engaged in some kind of relaxed conversation, going over international questions of the past and present, and when we would return to the subject of the path we had traveled during the war, that is what he said. When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so.

And...
Marshall Zhukov...

Today [1963] some say the Allies didn't really help us ... But listen, one cannot deny that the Americans shipped over to us material without which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able to continue the war.
Listen to this guy. Hes the man who was calling shots on the eastern front.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

Do you listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History? His podcast "Destroyer of Worlds" discusses the US's dominance after WWII due to having the atomic bomb. It's a great podcast overall with great details on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Check it out.

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Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be.

The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction," writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses fighting the Red Army.

"It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings.


The epic battles that eventually rolled back the Nazi advance -- the brutal winter siege of Stalingrad, the clash of thousands of armored vehicles at Kursk (the biggest tank battle in history) -- had no parallel on the Western Front, where the Nazis committed fewer military assets. The savagery on display was also of a different degree than that experienced farther west.

Hitler viewed much of what's now Eastern Europe as a site for "lebensraum" -- living space for an expanding German empire and race. What that entailed was the horrifying, systematic attempt to depopulate whole swaths of the continent. This included the wholesale massacre of millions of European Jews, the majority of whom lived outside Germany's pre-war borders to the east. But millions of others were also killed, abused, dispossessed of their lands and left to starve. ]

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None of this is wrong. The russians ate the vast majority of the third reichs wrath.
Where my disagreement comes in is whether a) the russians survive operation barbarossa without American intervention and b) whether the axis survives Germany's wehrmacht without Russian intervention.
This is problematic because lack of russian intervention is not possible because 1) Germany required Russian assets to supply the war effort and 2) Russia would never allow that to happen without intervention.
Now, we can postulate whether the americans could repel the german offensive without russian intervention. I postulate that indeed, american could endure the german onslaught because without russian intervention on any level, Germany was too poorly supplied and stretched out to properly supply an army covering europe excluding russia or russian (read: ukranian or Romanian oil, grain, sea lines to south america) influence.
Facts, the us had superior assets in manufacturing war machines, food (which is the basis on which any armed force moves) and oil, not to mention the actual will to wage war which germany found compromised following the failures of operation sea lion which, contrary to popular belief, was largely predicated on the british navy and and less so on the redeployment of crucial assets to the eastern front). The English at the time were fighting for their lives, the germans at this point were not. Desperation as it turns out, is a weapon that national should fear.
Beyond that, the united states had a population advantage.
Hold on, wife is making tacos and they're ready... back in 30.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

German doctrine in the second half of 1944 and early 1945 was to focus their best units with the latest weapons to drive the British and Americans off the continent after which they could refocus and drive back the Soviets. This is manifested clearly in the desperate and ill-fated Ardennes Offensive and the use of weapons like the V2, V1, Tiger I, Tiger II, Stg44 which were all disproportionately deployed against the Western Allies.

Poland, Romania, the Courland Pocket...all of this was very in tact for the Germans in 1944. They did not think it was impossible to throw back the Soviets if they just expel the British/American threat. Just because thirty million Americans didn't die of famine or the NKVD doesn't mean they didn't have a massive impact.

Ok. I'm back. What did I miss?

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014