Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "Top 7 Red Army Myths - World War 2" video.

  1. Lend-Lease was CRITICAL during 1942 for three reasons: 1) The Nazis destroyed the ONLY radio tube factory in the USSR during Typhoon. This reality was kept a state secret straight through the war and for decades after. The USA FLEW radio tubes to Stalin. This traffic was the PRIMARY reason for the Alacan Highway being given such an extreme priority. It was dedicated to supplying the transport aircraft of the day. They didn't have the range of modern jets. 2) Stalin had only ever used High Speed Steel as a cutting tip in his factories -- right up until he was invaded. HSS was invented circa 1900 by Taylor -- famous for his time & motion studies. Ford had adopted the Swedish invention of Tungsten Carbide cutting tips even in the 1920s. So TC had become the norm in the West. The USA purchased Swedish TC bits and had them flown over Finland to Stalin. These were paid for in gold -- US dollars were the same as gold. This action is not to be found in most histories. At the time, and for years and years afterwards, neither the USA nor USSR would acknowledge that this had happened. The only folks willing to say anything about it are the Swedes. TC increases tool speed ~8 times over versus HSS. (!!!!) THIS is where the production miracle sprung from. The story of moved factories is pure BS. You can't build such major factories in mere months. Even the USA -- with much better weather -- couldn't do it -- or anything like it. TC made EXISTING trans-Urals factories drastically more productive. The factory expansion didn't really get rolling until late into 1943. 3) Secrecy at the front. The US Army rolled up Western Electric phone cables that had been freshly delivered to its new divisions -- on the secret -- absolutely no paperwork at all -- so as to ship them PDQ to the Red Army. That this happened is only known from death-bed testamonies from the sergeants that lost their gear to the Red Army. (!!!) In the event it was these cables that permitted Uranus to succeed. The Red Army stopped using the radio! This blinded the German B'dienst crews. They had been the back-bone of the German defense. They'd always informed high command about Red Army radio chatter. The British at el Alamein pulled off the exact same stunt. They went radio silent, too. All that the Germans could read was spoofing traffic... dummy messages to no-one. Monty succeeded in getting Rommel to place his panzers way to the south when the attack was to be in the north. ( He ran a visibly obvious massive pipeline for water straight to the south. Rommel bit this ruse. ) And I ought to add #4: Because of the radio tube crisis, the Red Air Force HAD to surrender its tubes for command sets. Consequently, it had no radios in its training planes. (!!!) Consequently, even crappy 2nd line British and American planes were a godsend to the Red Air Force. They were overwhelmingly used as TRAINERS -- because they had radios. It was this exploding pool of pilots that did in the Luftwaffe... in 1943. Yes, it takes a while to train pilots. All of the high tonnage stuff that everyone talks about was nice but not critical. They're actually talking AWAY from what counted. The late arrival of huge tonnages makes modern Russian lads very proud -- because it strongly implies that LendLease arrived after the war was essentially won. Such is simply not so. Lastly, one item in LendLease needs particular mention. Harry Hopkins shipped ALL of the key elements to build a Hanford style plutonium production reactor to the USSR in 1945. Yup. HH was a traitor -- and die hard Bolshevik. The latter became obvious from his personal diary. (!!!) FDR had given HH carte blanche -- made him de facto President of the US #2. (!!!!) Few knew of this arrangement. At the time of the authorization, FDR was near death -- hardly aware of his surroundings. This was also the time that G. Marshall set the limit of the US Army's advance into Germany -- aka the Iron Curtain. Read a copy of "Marching Orders" for how that happened. He had no authority, but he did it. Ike covered for Marshall for ever afterwards, of course.
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