Allied Forces?

The Royal Navy had two huge battleships with five turretts carrying three
guns in each on the drawing boards. They simply lopped off the two rear ones
to comply with the treaty of Washington (which limited the tonnage of
capital ships) and that's how the Rodney and the Nelson came to look so odd.
IIRC they would have been about 50,000 tons each and the biggest battleships
in the world at the time.

 

says...

Funny how memories like that remain. When we lived in Singapore I used
to help my dad clean his Sterling SMG every time he brought it home,
which was often. I could strip and rebuild one in less than 90 seconds
by the time I was 7. I found his Browning 9mm pistol boring and never
bothered helping him with that.

 

Does the five million include six million Jews?
Does the USA's 300,000 include the ten million who would have died
anyway in a six year period? I think some analysis is required.

 

Utter bollocks! The Soviets / Stalin were aware of the inevitable clash with
Nazi Germany many years before the war. Their political and economic
system was mostly crap (as nearly everyone will recognise now) but that does
not detract from their dedication to development and production of arms.
The pounding the army took the first months, the general level of the Soviet
economy and the sheer size of the conflict (it could well be argued that all
other fronts in WW2 were insignificant) [1] meant that there was not enough
equipment until Germany started to collapse in 1944. If two men went into
battle sharing one gun, it was not because that was "cheap", it was because
it
was impossible to get another gun.

The catastrophic first years of the "Great Patriotic War" was, in my
opinion, largely due to Stalin's paranoia.
He slaughtered most high ranking officers in the 30's so the army leadership
at the beginning of the war were incompetent. Add to this a society where
slogans and propaganda replaced truth plus a legacy from the Tsar times
(that Stalin did nothing to alter) that humans were expendable.
To make matters worse, Stalin was so anxious to delay the inevitable war
that he stopped tactical preparations along the border that could
"provoke" the Germans. This was probably the costliest of all Soviet
mistakes in the war. The first weeks of Barbarossa might have looked very
different if the soviets had utilised their superb intelligence on German
planning (something they did with great effect at e.g. Kursk).

Stalinist Soviet was not the British Empire or the US. The way they won
the war was bloody but there and then it was the only way. The reason
we're not required to do the nazi salute and have Hitler pictures in
classrooms is because there were monsters like Chiukov in Stalingrad and
NKVD troops forcing penal formations into minefields.[2]

[1] How well would N Africa / Italy / Overlord have worked if the
Germans had 100+ more divisions at their disposal?

[2] When one thinks about brutal leadership and fanatical fighting one
has to remember a significant difference between western and eastern
fronts: Western Europeans could loose the war and suffer nazi rule,
Slavic people would be mostly exterminated if they lost. That was the
nazi plan and I think it was both clearly demonstrated in the occupied
areas and that the ultimate goals were known to the soviets.

 

Think Chamberlain and "Peace in our time" too


--
Beav

VN 750
Zed 1000
OMF# 19

 

For fucks sake don't say that's not true.


--
Beav

VN 750
Zed 1000
OMF# 19

 

Of course it's not true. They're grey.

 

Do the six million Jews include the twelve million people who died in
concentration camps?

Well, no and no. These numbers are soldiers, and the question was the
relative size of the countries' military efforts.

 

There was a revolution in Germany, but it was kind of a pop instead of a
bang. My college history professor believes that what Germany needed was
a blood-in-the-gutters revolution. But it didn't happen that way...

Hmm. I'm not entirely sure where the end result is any different.

(Oh, yes, those poor poor French. They were having such a jolly good
time invading Germany during the first part of the 1800s; why did they
Germans have to spoil that in 1870? The barstads!)

 

L'otre Chateau.

 

I wondered that, too.

Ali

 

You entirely miss the point. If Russia hadn't been in cahoots with Germany
at the beginning of WW2, this would never have happened:

 

That's because you were wanking furiously over an old RD400, out the
front, at the time....

 

TOG has a copy. TOG's favourite is the Pax Britannica trilogy, though.

 

Right from Mein Kampf, actually.

 

<snip>

Good stuff.

However, I'll just add one thing, and it's a tribute of sorts to the
Wehrmacht.

It took Germany six months to get to the gates of Moscow.

It took the Red Army, vastly bigger, with vastly more tanks and guns,
three and a half years to push them all the way back.

 

Pa handed his Webley in at some amnesty in the early 1970s.

Father of a friend (now a surgeon in the Frozen North) handed his
liberated weapons in at the same time, since ISTR that everyone was told
that this was the last amnssty, absolutely, no more, ever, last chance,
etc. His collection of weaponry, which he toted in the boot of his car
to the local police station, included a Panzerfaust. :-0

Plod was impressed.

 

"Grandy?

 

porl says...

He wore a sheet and flip-flops.

 

Make a great outside kharzi.

When I was a nipper, my folks house had a brick built, concrete topped
bomb shelter in the back garden. Common sight at the time in a lot of
gardens. Google sat images show them all gone now round there.