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73 years ago today, WWII was brought to an end

EMNofSeattle said:
The entirety of the Soviet Union's logistical capacity was due to lend lease. without the trucks and locomotives and supplies for road and railroad construction they could never have sustained their war effort because their untouched industrial capacity was over the mountains far away from the battlefield. without our lend lease it would've been logistically impossible to sustain a campaign, At early stages in lend lease it was as simple as gunpowder, Russian small arms ammunition was charged with American powder and that was a quarter of their ammunition supply, we're talking inability to supply rounds to riflemen without lend lease, BOOTS we gave 15 MILLION pairs of BOOTS the Russian industrial base was incapable of supplying soldiers with BOOTS! If the logistical capacity to win campaigns wasn't present, I strongly doubt Stalin remains as leader, if Moscow had fallen the remaining elements of the Russian military might be thinking "coup time" and sue for peace after removing Stalin.
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EMNofSeatle:

At its highest lend-lease trucks made up about a third of Russian military transports and about 15% of all transports in the USSR. The Soviets had 10,000 locomotives and over 100,000 units of rolling stock but Lend-Lease only provided about 2,000 locomotives and about 11,000 units of rolling stock. That's about 20% of the locomotives and between 10-11% of the rolling stock. So to claim that the entirety of the Soviet logistic capacity was comprised of lend-lease provided vehicles flies in the face of the factual evidence.

The bulk of the Lend-Lease aid from the USA didn't start arriving to the USSR until early-mid 1943. By that time the Soviet Red Army had stopped the German juggernaut and had already turned the tide of the war. Moscow had been saved a year before just about any US aid arrived. British aid had made a difference but not US aid at this point. Stalingrad had been encircled and Von Paulus had surrendered just as the first trickles of US Lend-Lease aid were coming in. Lend-Lease didn't save the USSR. But it did help doom Hitler's thousand-year Reich to becoming a 12-year Reich.

Where US aid helped was in supplying the great offensives of 1943 to 1945 as the Soviets destroyed 70% of the German Armed Forces and drove them back out of Russia, Belarus, the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans and into the Getman heartlands of Austria and Germany.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.
 
Evilroddy said:
EMNofSeatle:

At its highest lend-lease trucks made up about a third of Russian military transports and about 15% of all transports in the USSR. The Soviets had 10,000 locomotives and over 100,000 units of rolling stock but Lend-Lease only provided about 2,000 locomotives and about 11,000 units of rolling stock. That's about 20% of the locomotives and between 10-11% of the rolling stock. So to claim that the entirety of the Soviet logistic capacity was comprised of lend-lease provided vehicles flies in the face of the factual evidence.

The bulk of the Lend-Lease aid from the USA didn't start arriving to the USSR until early-mid 1943. By that time the Soviet Red Army had stopped the German juggernaut and had already turned the tide of the war. Moscow had been saved a year before just about any US aid arrived. British aid had made a difference but not US aid at this point. Stalingrad had been encircled and Von Paulus had surrendered just as the first trickles of US Lend-Lease aid were coming in. Lend-Lease didn't save the USSR. But it did help doom Hitler's thousand-year Reich to becoming a 12-year Reich.

Where US aid helped was in supplying the great offensives of 1943 to 1945 as the Soviets destroyed 70% of the German Armed Forces and drove them back out of Russia, Belarus, the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans and into the Getman heartlands of Austria and Germany.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.
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Exactly. By the time LL got up to gear, the Russians were already beating the Germans back. The USSR won the war mostly on their own.
 
Tigerace112 said:
If the USSR had “decisively defeated” the Germans in 1941 the Germans would not have continued rolling deep into the USSR. A “decisively defeated” force does not turn around and thrash the Soviets yet again as the Germans did.
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Numerous historical combatants have decisively rebounded from decisive defeat. For example, see Thermopylae, Cannae, Falkirk, Verneuil, Narva, and Chancellorsville.


Tigerace112 said:
Close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades, to quote the old cliche. Coming close to defeating an enemy but falling short is not the same thing as defeating an enemy.
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“Decisively defeating” an enemy in a battle or campaign does not mean “Winning the war”. That is an obvious fact of military history.


Tigerace112 said:
Except for the fact that the Germans “bagged” immense numbers of Russians in encirclements in 1941—

“Also called "cauldrons", the great encirclement battles of 1941 cost the Soviet Union dearly. There were approximately 8-11 pockets in 1941, each of which netted more than 100,000 prisoners - most of them would be dead within the next eight months.[1]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German...ion_Barbarossa
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Yes, and despite these great losses the USSR decisively defeated the German attack on Moscow in the center of the front, and the USSR decisively defeated the German attack on the trans-Don River region in the south of the front.

Then the 1942 campaign started with numerous decisive losses by the USSR, losses in which their southern sector was completely overrun, and the Germany advanced to the Volga River and the Caucasus mountains. Then the USSR stiffened, held, and counterattacked, resulting at Stalingrad in the greatest loss to date in Germany's military history.


Tigerace112 said:
Despite what later Soviet propaganda might have said, they were horrifically mauled in the opening days of the Eastern front, and didn’t really manage to fully retake the initiative until after Stalingrad.
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Addressed.


Tigerace112 said:
The fact that people like Zhukov managed go escape the purges doesn’t change the simple historical fact that no matter how much the Soviets might have hated to admit it, lend lease was vital in keeping them afloat.
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US Lend Lease was minuscule to nil in 1941. UK deliveries, especially of tanks, may have been essential to the success of the Soviet 12/41 counterattack. However, by 12/5 the Germans were at the end of their offensive strength, in the midst of the most severe winter in a generation, while the USSR had a million fresh troops just transferred from Siberia, so the Germans were not going to go a step further, foreign aid or no foreign aid.
 
OldFatGuy said:
It mentions both nations, focused on the Philippines.

That's not the point of my post, the superficial.

We're still fighting, venue after venue for battlefields. The warring never ended. Different participants, perhaps, but that is superficial.

I don't need a parade to display the value of American troops, I'd rather work on keeping them alive. Out of other's battles.
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No, it does not mention both nations, and for you to say so means you have not read and understood it.
 
Tigerace117 said:
Without American lend- lease the USSR never could have stayed afloat in the first place. Not to mention, of course, that most of the Russian bleeding was self inflicted; had they not decided to murder their top officers, their casulties would have been far lower.
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I wouldn't go so far as to say that. Lend Lease alleviated a great logistical weight from the Soviets allowing them to focus their industrial production on weaponry and armaments. But by 1942, when lead lease kicked off in full, the Germans were already well on their way to operational failure in Case Blue.
 
OldFatGuy said:
One of my uncles died fighting alongside the Nationalists in 1947. I never got to meet him. He saw action in Africa, Italy, France, Belgium and Germany, only to die in battle in China after the end of WWII. We didn't send tens of thousands, only hundreds, but our men fought and died. I agree with you. I never said it a good move, it was anti commie stupidity at work.
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I would like to know a lot more about these "hundreds", and even if there were that many, a few hundred is too paltry to be at all significant in a war involving millions on a battle area the size of the USA.
 
Bodhisattva said:
The Russians would have lost if they had been on their own...
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On D-Day the Russians were driving the Germans back across Poland. The Normandy invasion was as much about keeping Russia out of western Europe as it was about defeating Germany.
 
Grand Mal said:
On D-Day the Russians were driving the Germans back across Poland. The Normandy invasion was as much about keeping Russia out of western Europe as it was about defeating Germany.
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Incorrect.

Defeating the enemy was the sole purpose of all our operations, and the more the Russians did the less we had to do, and that was fine with us. As for the Russians, they had been screaming for a second front for years, were happy to see it finally come into being. Also, if they were so intent on hogging the teritorial gains they would have encouraged us to take our sweet time.

And more: as of D-Day tjhe Russians had not et entered Poland. See map:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/BagrationMap2.jpg
 
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USViking said:
I don't think we even had any advisors in China during the civil war, and if we did Chaing Kai-shek was not good at taking advice: if you had read Barbara Tuchman's Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945 you would know what I was talking about.
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Your acceptance of the facetious as literal does not astonish me. Stilwell's experience was one, there were others.

Never rely on a single source.
 
EMNofSeattle said:
Yes it does, because communism as a political force is still alive and well, where as the racially-based national Socialism is not.
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Of course, the Baba Yaga is coming, he's coming, he's coming, hide!

The devil is in the pudding, and the pudding is right here. No war ever matched the deaths and cruelty of the first mechanized war in this world, the American Civil war, for death and destruction. No, not tanks and air support, railroads transporting troops and artillery, gatling guns, breech loading rifles with cartridges, and revolvers in the hands of cavalry. We taught the world about modern warfare and now we terrify the world. We are far more frightening than communism as a political force. But you can feel free to spew the rhetoric of hate.
 
OldFatGuy said:
Your acceptance of the facetious as literal does not astonish me.
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Are you talking about that "advisors" wisecrack? I think I caught that you were implying we had combat personnel officially masqueading as "advisors". I chose to take it literally because it suited me.


OldFatGuy said:
Never rely on a single source.
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A single source of the quality of Tuchman's work is often good enough, and is good enough here, and if you think you know of an effective contradicting source, tell us about it.
 
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USViking said:
....a few hundred is too paltry....
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Tell that to the dead. Thanks for reminding why I prefer to get involved in internet threads refighting wars of the past.
 
USViking said:
Are you talking about that "advisors" wisecrack? I think I caught that you were implying we had combat personnel officialyymasqueading as "advisors". I chose to take it literally because it suited me.



A single source of the quality of Tuchman's work is often good enough, and is good enough here, and if you think you know of an effective contradicting source, tell us about it.
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That wasn't a crack, it was a gaping hole.

Whatever.
 
OldFatGuy said:
Of course, the Baba Yaga is coming, he's coming, he's coming, hide!

The devil is in the pudding, and the pudding is right here. No war ever matched the deaths and cruelty of the first mechanized war in this world, the American Civil war, for death and destruction. No, not tanks and air support, railroads transporting troops and artillery, gatling guns, breech loading rifles with cartridges, and revolvers in the hands of cavalry. We taught the world about modern warfare and now we terrify the world. We are far more frightening than communism as a political force. But you can feel free to spew the rhetoric of hate.
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True mechanized war recieved its true theoretical underpinning from Fuller and Lidell Hart in the 1920s. Guderian was an immediate convert, and it was he who in the 1930s convinced Hitler to embrace the concept.
 
OldFatGuy said:
Tell that to the dead. Thanks for reminding why I prefer to get involved in internet threads refighting wars of the past.
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I stand by what I said, and if the dead have spirits, then those spirits are sure to rue the bad decisions they made in life when they chose to be a part of such a paltry effort.
 
Grand Mal said:
On D-Day the Russians were driving the Germans back across Poland. The Normandy invasion was as much about keeping Russia out of western Europe as it was about defeating Germany.
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I meant that if the USA and Britain were not fighting Germany that Russia would have lost... all those troops in North Africa, the Balkans and Western Europe... all of the German Navy could have been used against the Russians... who had none... that kind of stuff. Britain and the USA spread Germany so thin it was overwhelmed.
 
EMNofSeattle said:
Germany's nuclear project was way behind ours and suffered from a lack of resources and technical expertise, there was no risk of London being nuked, first off by the end of the war we had undisputed command of skies and any bomber approaching the British coast would've been located with radar and intercepted regardless of payload, which wouldn't have been nuclear because the Germans were nowhere close to a functioning bomb and the reason we put so much resources into our project was because we overestimated their progress towards one and wanted to have it first to use it against them. And if I were an allied general or political leader I absolutely would be willing to risk reprisal against London because the consequences of leaving a Germany surrendering on their own terms would be even greater, and that's leveraged against a lack of capability for Germans to deploy a weapon they did not and would not possess. Even assuming a defeated Soviet Union, it still would've required massive numbers of German soldiers to garrison and so the resource shift would not be great, plus we could've (and in our timeline did) cripple the ability of the Germans to move personnel from the Eastern front to the Western front.

There would be no Waffen SS funding advisors and training because Germany would still be defeated.
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Again, you are making a lot of assumptions based on little to no evidence. The Germans wouldn't have even needed to get bombers over the target; their rocket projects would have been able to deliver the weapon.

Except for the fact that the Allies clearly didn’t agree with given the multiple commando operations launched in attempts to disrupt the German program; for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_heavy_water_sabotage

The idea that the Soviets being knocked out in 1941 or 1942 would not have significantly changed the historical timeline is downright ludicrous; immense amounts of troops and resources would have been freed up and arguing that “oh, the Germans didn’t succeed in OTL so they couldn’t have succeeded” simply doesn’t work as a premise.

Yeah.....there wouldn’t be an “Allies” for much longer if we’d been willing to let London get nuked.

Not necessarily; for all the talk about “lebensraum” the Germans certainly had no shortage of collaborators in Eastern Europe who could be used to “hold the fort” in Russia—-with the added benefit that disorganized bands of partisans would be the worst they would face rather than the full might of the Red Army.

That is a huge assumption based on little to no evidence.....merely wishful thinking on your part.
 
OldFatGuy said:
It was Europe's war until Japan attacked. It was Japan and Europe's war in Asia until Japan attacked.

America favored isolationism, having more interest in manufacturing new washing machines and refrigerators than tanks, planes and guns unless we could sell them for a profit.

Had not France and Britain's harsh terms at Versailles set the stage for the rising of the beast and his henchman, there possibly would have been no war in Europe. I say possibly, because Europe had practiced war as a sport for a countless generations, millennia. Plus, sentiment supporting Germany was fairly solid here, with most white Americans of Germanic descent. The German Bundt held parades on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and hosted soccer games, beer festivals, And fans like Lindbergh, Ford, the folks at IBM, and so on marched in those parades. Business partners, mutual admirers.

The Japanese with their brutal invasion of China meant nothing to most Americans. The Rape of Nanking wasn't even a rumor in the US. We knew China as a land of starvation because some American's saw Pearl Buck's movie, and Paul Muni was a popular actor. Because French and British colonial interests were endangered, money, we allowed them to convince us to embargo Japan, denying them refined oil to power their machine, more steel scrap to build their war equipment, and so on. Japan had dreams of an empire, but made the tactical and strategic mistake of attacking at Pearl Harbor, as if that would alter the embargo? Somebody wasn't wearing their thinking hat.

Americans knew the Chinese with the American AntiChinese League, fighting against further yellow man immigration. We knew China was the home of silk, paper, fireworks, and those infamous American dishes, Chow Mein and General Tsao's Chicken, not to mention fortune cookies and tea. And of course opium dens, a British import to China from northern India. Money. And of course "No tickee, no washee." And Charlie Chan movies, with a white guy playing a Chinese detective.

I've kept this answer to a complex question as concise as possible. Please forgive me for what I omitted. And let's not confuse a realistic set of observations with right and wrong, morality and other motivations. We can leave that to the war propaganda of the day, and what Americans learned during the war and after the fact about the brutal and horrific actions of the Axis powers. Another discussion for another day.

Nor am I saying America, in the end, did not act justly and morally for its decisions to fight. But neither theater of war was our war until Japan stumbled, and attacked. The visions of our enemies for world domination was a factor of serial melodramas in our movie theaters, and not a reality for most Americans prior to the war. These weren't our wars, tho they became our wars.

Meanwhile fighting these wars did not end wars, nor did the promise of horror from nuclear weapons stop wars. We are still fighting the wars of others.
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“Europe’s War”...... except for the fact that Hitler had no intention of allowing the United States to hide behind the oceans like some fantasize we could have.

Oh, and the time when Japan took out a US Navy vessel a couple years before Pearl Harbor. But the killing of US military personnel isn’t a big deal, right? :roll:

America favored isolationism because people were dumb enough to think they could hide behind the oceans.

That is much more true of World War One than World War Two. By the 1930s with the exception of literal fascists most of “pro-German” sentiment was less “pro-German” and more isolationist in general. Look at how fast the Abwehr guys got picked up during their half assed sabotage mission. There was no real “Germanic identity” movement in the US by 1940.

No, we embargoed Japan because A) Japan had sunk a US ship earlier, so there was already increasing tension; B) American diplomats and journalists had been reporting on Japan’s rampage; in fact, there were numerous reports by American journalists about what was happening in China

https://www.readex.com/readex-report/nanjing-atrocities-reported-us-newspapers-1937-38

In other words, you have a hate boner for Europe, and you are still bitter we didn’t cling to the stupidity of isolationism. Noted.
 
USViking said:
Numerous historical combatants have decisively rebounded from decisive defeat. For example, see Thermopylae, Cannae, Falkirk, Verneuil, Narva, and Chancellorsville.



“Decisively defeating” an enemy in a battle or campaign does not mean “Winning the war”. That is an obvious fact of military history.



Yes, and despite these great losses the USSR decisively defeated the German attack on Moscow in the center of the front, and the USSR decisively defeated the German attack on the trans-Don River region in the south of the front.

Then the 1942 campaign started with numerous decisive losses by the USSR, losses in which their southern sector was completely overrun, and the Germany advanced to the Volga River and the Caucasus mountains. Then the USSR stiffened, held, and counterattacked, resulting at Stalingrad in the greatest loss to date in Germany's military history.



Addressed.



US Lend Lease was minuscule to nil in 1941. UK deliveries, especially of tanks, may have been essential to the success of the Soviet 12/41 counterattack. However, by 12/5 the Germans were at the end of their offensive strength, in the midst of the most severe winter in a generation, while the USSR had a million fresh troops just transferred from Siberia, so the Germans were not going to go a step further, foreign aid or no foreign aid.
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The Persians didn’t immediately conquer the majority of Greece months after Thermopylae. The Romans didn’t annihilate a Carthaginian army immediately after Cannae. The Union Army didn’t smash into Richmond weeks after Chancellorsville. In all of those cases it took substantial amounts of time for the defeated force to recover—-often years. The Germans turned right back around and gave the Soviets another right hook. To call Barbarossa a “decisive defeat” for Germany is simply inaccurate.

Uh....no, nothing was “easy” for the Soviets in 1941, especially not stopping the drive on Moscow. You seem unable to comprehend that “decisive victories” do not lead to substantial territorial losses and immense casualties for the “victors”, no matter what the USSR claimed at the time.

Except for the fact that they continued to push much deeper into the USSR well after the winter of 1941. That’s simple historical fact.
 
Jredbaron96 said:
I wouldn't go so far as to say that. Lend Lease alleviated a great logistical weight from the Soviets allowing them to focus their industrial production on weaponry and armaments. But by 1942, when lead lease kicked off in full, the Germans were already well on their way to operational failure in Case Blue.
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The Russians don’t seem to agree though.....

https://www.rbth.com/business/2015/05/08/allies_gave_soviets_130_billion_under_lend-lease_45879.html

“The importance of economic cooperation with the U.S., UK and Canada cannot be overestimated. According to the dollar rate of 2003, the inflation-adjusted value of these supplies amounted to $130 billion. These supplies were critical in some key areas. For example, in the beginning of 1942, Western tanks fully replenished Soviet losses, and exceeded them by three times. About 15 percent of the aircraft used by Soviet air forces were supplied by Allies, including the Airacobra fighter and Boston bomber. The Allies supplied 15,000 state-of-the-art machines at that time; for example, famous Soviet ace Alexander Pokryshkin flew Airacobra, as did the rest of his squadron. He shot down 59 enemy aircraft, and 48 of them were thanks to American military equipment.”
 
USViking said:
I stand by what I said, and if the dead have spirits, then those spirits are sure to rue the bad decisions they made in life when they chose to be a part of such a paltry effort.
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Do you think those "spirits" believe in you?
 
Tigerace117 said:
The Russians don’t seem to agree though.....
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Don't get me wrong, Lend Lease was a major boon to the Soviets. It's just by the time it arrived in bulk the Germans were already losing.
 
Tigerace117 said:
“Europe’s War”...... except for the fact that Hitler had no intention of allowing the United States to hide behind the oceans like some fantasize we could have.

America favored isolationism because people were dumb enough to think they could hide behind the oceans.
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You are correct, however you are speaking with educated hindsight. Partly so, for most Americans, they were merely more concerned with domestic issues, and survival during harsh times for many.

Tigerace117 said:
That is much more true of World War One than World War Two. By the 1930s with the exception of literal fascists most of “pro-German” sentiment was less “pro-German” and more isolationist in general. Look at how fast the Abwehr guys got picked up during their half assed sabotage mission. There was no real “Germanic identity” movement in the US by 1940.
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Pro German doesn't mean pro Nazi. There were multiple pro German movements in the US, whether in Yorkville and Ridgewood of NYC, or almost all of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, so pervasive in the southwest as to be the core fo Tex-Mex music and dancing. We're not speaking of a disloyalty on the part of Americans having Germanic descent, rather a disinterest with a war involving Germany. Isolationism wasn't merely based on what proved to be a false protection offered by two oceans. It was far more complex. At the time, most Americans either themselves or their antecedents fled the wars, abuses, oppressions of Europe and they had no desire to see the same happen here, they wanted more distance than oceans afforded. You cannot honestly judge by today's views.

Tigerace117 said:
Oh, and the time when Japan took out a US Navy vessel a couple years before Pearl Harbor. But the killing of US military personnel isn’t a big deal, right? :roll:

No, we embargoed Japan because A) Japan had sunk a US ship earlier, so there was already increasing tension; B) American diplomats and journalists had been reporting on Japan’s rampage; in fact, there were numerous reports by American journalists about what was happening in China

https://www.readex.com/readex-report/nanjing-atrocities-reported-us-newspapers-1937-38
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You are using standards of more modern views, with the benefit of that remarkable hindsight, again. I strongly suggest you start doing some easy research, read some of those letters to the editors responding to those reports. You are in for an education about American racism and bigotry you've unlikely paid attention to previously. Americans didn't care what about Asia, and what the peoples there did to each other. The sinking of the USS Panay on the Yangtze River in China by the Japanese did create an American response, demand to know why an American ship was patrolling the Yangtze, demands for military resignations, and a massive PR effort of the day to isolate the presidency from criticism for the same. For the most part, the American people did not care about Nanking. The few reports were mostly ignored.

Tigerace117 said:
In other words, you have a hate boner for Europe, and you are still bitter we didn’t cling to the stupidity of isolationism. Noted.
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Grow up, there is no need for such a silly and absurd conclusion and statement. European wars are far from over. Civilization is a thin veneer. The Balkans are still a matchstick. Yesterday 50k Germans attended a protest against the rise of the far right in Germany. The problem remains, more than 300k Germans are supporting the far right politically and Merkel's coalition government isn't merely challenged, it is endangered. Interest by Scandinavian citizens for closing borders is growing exponentially. Half of France is pushing for secession. Spain has a similar problem. Brexit says far more than you think.

It doesn't matter what either of our political views are, without understanding the context of the times, there can be no honest evaluation of what occurred, nor an understanding of what we face in the future.

I came home with my granddaughter so she could restring her fiddle (overdue) where it is quiet and so she could get a free set of strings from me :). Plus I wanted to return my 12 string here, and head back with a 6 string for the evening's more gentle music. She's almost finished. Then we will head back to my son's home, six blocks away, to enjoy the remainder of our Labor Day festivities. I suggest you do and enjoy the same.
 
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