Comments by "TheThirdMan" (@thethirdman225) on "TIKhistory"
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It depends on a lot of things. If the Hamburg firestorm raids were anything to go by then yes, there probably were a number of people who were incinerated and never found or identified. But the casualty figures for Dresden have always been ‘in play’. The truth is that nobody knows. Do you count the victims in the city and stop there? Or do you include the refugees on the roads outside the city in the days following? The figures over 100,000 are almost certainly not accurate and yes, some of that was Nazi propaganda but with books from the likes of Frederick Taylor, I think there has been a bit of a tendency to swing back the other way, perhaps to the extent of underestimating. I didn’t like Taylor’s book. I didn’t like his book on the Berlin Wall either, for much the same reason. Not because his version of events didn’t tally with mine - in fact, he did succeed in changing my view. But Taylor seems to be trying to erase that sense of guilt felt by many a bomber crew on this operation and so many others like it and he’s just a bit too strident in his characterisations for me to be comfortable with what he’s saying. I will never know how those men felt and yes, everyone knows there was a war on. But adopting the, ‘Oh well, the Germans bombed Coventry’, line as a central tenet for thinking it only right and proper that Dresden should suffer as it did doesn’t quite cut it. Sure feelings ran high at the time but trying to take us back to thinking the same way isn’t a particularly noble position fifty or sixty years later.
I was in Dresden a bit over 30 years ago and it was still in ruins but with a large amount of realestate occupied by DDR-era monoliths. In fact I stayed in one of them, a former youth training facility to the south west of the city centre. The cobblestone streets still spoke, even then, of the city’s tragic history.
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@chuckysmaria6466 There weren't nearly as many of those as people think. It doesn't take a lot of reading to find that the number of people actually opposed to Hitler after say, 1933, was pretty small. A lot of people believe there was a significant proportion of the population who were against Hitler but within a year or so they were all gone. The average German figured that as long as the kept their noses clean, they led a reasonably good existence. Many just lived a life of conflicted resignation. There was no real resistance and certainly no formal resistance movement. There were plenty of big businesses that cooperated with ad supported the Nazis. Krupp, Porsche, MAN, Henschel, I.G. Faben and a whole host of others, who were actually a bit too big for even Hitler to intimidate, were quite happy to go along for the ride.
The Nazis were very corporate.
The point of all this is that if a nation as collectively intelligent as Germany could fall for a fraud like Hitler, anyone could. And we're seeing history repeat itself today.
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@hailbane9633 Good grief, it’s hard to know where to start with these assumptions. First of all, unions were banned under the Nazis. Who was the principal beneficiary? Corporations. Secondly, the Nazi party members who controlled the boards or were members of said board were board members before they became Nazis. They were not parachuted into the corporations as part of some imaginary Nazi policy. Finally, the much quoted example of price fixing is not an example of left wing policy. Quite the opposite. In most western democracies, price fixing is illegal. Without such laws, corporations will fix prices themselves. Who are the principal beneficiaries of this and other cartel-like behaviour? The corporations.
Unfortunately, this and other knee jerk reactionary assumptions are rarely tempered by a step backwards to look at the bigger picture. Before declaring something you don’t like as “left wing” or “socialism”, you would do well to use the Latin moto, “qui Bono?” (Who benefits?”) In other words, follow the money. Corporations had a very large amount of leverage in the Nazi economy and were not acting under the direction of the government.
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@w8stral Well you fell head-long into that, didn’t you?
You might have missed it but the increasing gap between rich and poor and the growth in insecure employment at the lower end of the job market in the west is hardly Marxism. Furthermore, with universities running courses to supply industry, the content is hardly likely to be Marxist either, for reasons of practicality, if nothing else. If humanities courses are run by Marxists then perhaps you could explain the runaway success of basically unregulated capitalism over the past thirty years because according to you, this is a product of “the left”, or whatever else you imagine it to be. Ye they are the products of parliaments made up of largely University-educated representatives. Then there’s the massive growth on alt-right ideology that has spawned such cultural luminaries as Anders Behring Breivik and Brenton Tarrant. Was it cultural Marxism that stormed the Capitol building in January? No, of course it wasn’t. Well, not unless you believe another well-known cultural Marxist mouthpiece, QAnon. Was it a cultural Marxist who shot up that mosque in Christchurch? Nope. Was it a cultural Marxist who shot and killed more than 70 people at a meeting of young socialists in Norway a few years ago? Nope.
If the marxists are in charge, they’re doing a rubbish job of being Marxist.
In short, cultural Marxism is the rally cry of a loser/victim cult that has no use in society. And you can call me all the names you like for daring to disagree but really all you’re doing is trying to enforce your own version of political correctness, the thing you people despise the most.
I’m loving this.🤗
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@duality5503 Once again, so what? Who denies that the Nazis were violent? Nobody. Who denies that they had left wing policies? Nobody. Who denies that they had right wing policies? Nobody. Well, nobody who knows anything about it, anyway. So really, all you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about is being able to leverage this as an argument against socialism. If you had ever read anything of substance about the history of Hitler and the Nazis, like Fest’s book, “The Face of the Third Reich” or “Hitler” by the same author, you would know that everything you are saying is completely pointless and designed to “convert” you.
In short, you are being manipulated, mostly by elaborate fakery and distortion. If you can’t learn to grade information properly then you probably haven’t much hope.
All extremist and totalitarian movements come disguised as people’s movements. That doesn’t make them socialist. In fact, it doesn’t confer any particular political belief. What history does show us though is that such movements are usually happy to embrace dictatorship. Look what’s happening in Eastern Europe right now as irrational fear of socialism gives rise to the extreme right and increasingly one party states.
Look at what happened in the former Yugoslavia when propagandists primed the population on all sides and rode the crest of filthy nationalism to what was supposed to be a glorious victory. All because people believed what they were told and didn’t check it.
You are being led along by the nose. I hope you learn the art of bullshit detection before it’s too late because you are falling for the very tactics Hitler and the Nazis used. Those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat it.
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@Abu Troll al cockroachistan
"But do tell me, how much do you think it helped the USSR when Hitler started sending parts of his troops on the East front to the West Front"
Probably quite a lot. I'd have to look into it. It's just a question of what was deliberate and what wasn't. Zaloga goes into a lot of detail in his book "Armored Champion: The Top Tanks of WWII", regarding numbers available on the Eastern Front. But there was always a distraction (Hitler should never have got involved in North Africa). It seemed that no sooner had one campaign finished than another one started. This is reflected in the experience of the Luftwaffe. Williamson Murray came to the same conclusion. The German forces were simply too widely spread from 1941 onwards.
One thing that needs to be considered, IMHO, is the general trend of what was going on in the East anyway. There were three major battles the Germans lost before Kursk: Moscow, Leningrad and most famously, Stalingrad. Once they were halted at the gates of Moscow, all their impetus was lost. Bernhard Kast (yes, I've mentioned him already) adds to this video with his contention that the Germans were defeated not by the Russian winter but outfought by the Red Army. He shows this with statistics. Can't remember off hand which video he did this in.
Once the German momentum had been halted, all they could really hope to do was cause murder and mayhem in the hope that the other side would give up. The longer things went on, the less chance there was of that happening.
"To help in France and later the Battle of the Bulge ????"
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
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@nickhanlon9331
"I think you don't understand how democracies are undermined and destroyed from within."
I suggest to you that I understand it better than you do. Look at one of the more recent attempts to undermine democracy. Donald Trump. Plenty of popular support. Good at mobilising his supporters. Good at emotional speech making, identifying enemies and pointing them like a loaded gun at whomsoever he doesn't like.
Look at Viktor Orban and a few of the other Eastern European leaders. Look at Erdogan in Turkey. All these people are popular, all were democratically elected and all represent major existential threats to democracy. Their particular political stripe doesn't matter at all. In fact, they are all avowed anti-socialist.
It is this kind of political purity, regardless of which side it comes from, that is at the heart of the problem. A willingness to dispense with democratic process to further one person's ambitions (as it is the specific cases I mentioned).
"Outlandish promises are made, people vote for them, the country becomes ruined."
You talk like someone who can't stand it when your team loses an election. All politicians make promises they don't keep. All of them. Without exception. Seriously mate, when democracy speaks you man up and take it on the chin. You don't storm the Capitol Building because someone told you the result was rigged and because you didn't like it, you chose to believe it.
"My duty is to make people aware of this."
That's very noble of you. Do you intend to apply this even handedly?
"And yes it is pretty clearcut when it comes to socialism."
And yet the most egregious breaches of democratic process in recent times have been by avowed anti-socialists. Turkey, Hungary and Poland are all slowly moving to being one party states again. This kind of naïve political purity is far more dangerous than any election promises. This is the sort of thinking that says after an election loss that "this cannot be allowed to stand".
"It doesn't work no matter if it is wearing jackboots or wearing a Mao suit."
Sweden. Socialism has many forms. What you are talking about is communism. Learn the difference if you are going to start a crusade.
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@duality5503
"The Nazis had a pact with the Soviet Union? the Molitov Rubbentrop pact it's well known in 1939?"
Yes, I knew you'd find out about that eventually. Naturally, you are deliberately misinterpreting. That pact was one of convenience, partly because the Soviet Union wanted to regain the territory lost after WWI (which is why they stopped when they did). The Nazis were acting entirely out of self-interest and the Soviet commanders knew the Germans would eventually attack them (even if Stalin didn't). So from that perspective, it's unsurprising that they entered into that pact but since the Germans attacked the Soviet Union less than two years later, it was clearly disingenuous at best and confers nothing on the claimed relationship of a belief model you are so desperate to convey.
So, wrong once again.
The Germans signed the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union in 1922, which made each the other's largest trading partner. The fledgling Soviet Union benefitted a lot from this agreement and so did the post WWI Germans. Hitler effectively repealed it in 1933 when he came to power. From then on, Hitler and the Nazis engaged in a propaganda war with the Soviet Union, decrying Bolshevism as Jewish and the Slavic people as sub-human, suitable only as slave labour or for extermination. The also used the secret police to spy on Soviet agencies and even individuals. Further to that, Mein Kampf talked about Lebensraum, which gave the Soviets a pretty good idea of his intentions.
If you had ever read anything of substance, you would know this.
"your should stop trying to cover up the historical crimes of Socialists and Communists"
Show me one place where I have done this.
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@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 Wrong. The German generals, Manstein, Guderian, Halder, etc., wrote their memoirs (from "memory", rather than from diaries) They all came up with the same excuses:
1) That fool Hitler,
2) General "Winter" and
3) Hordes of "Russian" troops.
Recent research shows they were wrong. The Allies wanted to believe them and they did. They fell for the German narrative like an egg from a tall chicken. They didn't cherry pick. They didn't have to. First of all, there was a need to rehabilitate the German identity, since the West was going to be a part of the front line against the Soviet Union and secondly, they believed it because they didn't want to believe the Red Army was any good.
They were wrong.
You want some detail or references on this?
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@GuyFierisShirt
"The state the army was in was that it was around 5 times larger than the German army, plenty of fuel, plenty of everything."
Well, by that metric, Barbarossa should never have succeeded.
I'm sorry but this is simply not true. The Red Army was far from ready in 1941. If you have a source that backs you up, I'll read it but In his book 'The Red Army and the Second World War', Alexander Hill describes just how unprepared the Soviets were when Germany attacked. Their tank strength, for example, looked impressive on paper but in reality, was far from. The oft-quoted 20,000 tanks ignores the fact that as many as 8,000 were out-of-date T-26s. Many were BT-5 and BT-7 light tanks. Very few were modern T-34 and KV-1 models. Furthermore, they had no fuel and the crews had no experience. Their air support aircraft were Polikarpovs from the Spanish Civil War. The Il2 wasn't in large scale production. Hill says this in Chapter 12 'The End of Typhoon'. Not even the German generals - who love a good excuse - claim the Red Army was ready for them.
What's more, the restructuring of the Red army and the re-equipping process was barely halfway. In the case of tanks and aircraft, it wasn't even close.
As an analogue to this, in the Western Desert in the winter of 1940-41, General Richard O'Connor over a period of a couple of months, took an army of 38,000 and defeated an Italian army almost ten times the size.
"They were just disorganized and caught off guard positioning for an invasion."
That is simply not true.
"You are obsessed with Germany and think they were superpowered boogiemen, when in reality they were a bunch of chumps compared to the Russians."
Is that what I think, is it? Really? I thought it was you saying the Soviets were a bunch of fanatical super soldiers or something... For a minute I thought you were going to call me a commie or something. Either way, if you can't back up what you're saying - and you can't - then it's just so much fluff.
"Hitler got played like a fiddle by Stalin."
The entire German army underestimated the effect of the invasion of the Soviet Union and they underestimated the time it would take to defeat them. That's why they didn't have any winter clothing (and no, General Winter didn't win the war).
But all this ignores a fundamental that you failed to address in your comment: having a big army is one thing. Being able to transport to where it's needed and supply it is a whole 'nother thing. The Soviets couldn't even supply it, even on home ground, much less somewhere else.
Incidentally - and Hill is a good source for this - the Wehrmacht that invaded in June 1941 was about twice the size of the Red Army in the West. Doesn’t sound like the Red Army was marshalling for an attack when they left half their troops in the east.
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@GuyFierisShirt
" The T26 was designed in 1931, while the panzer 1 was designed in 1934, the T26 was hardly an outdated tank. In fact in many regards in outclassed the Panzer1, it had a better gun and armor for example. "
The T-26 was out-of-date by the end of the Spanish Civil War. This is not a matter of armour/range/penetration data or when it was built. The T-26 was no longer able to effectively fulfil its designated mission anymore. Comparing it to the PzKpfw I is pointless in exactly the same way as comparing a Panther to an M3 Stuart. They fulfilled different purposes. The T-26 was past its use-by date.
"Don't forget your "mighty evil black German army" was using horse and carriage while the Soviets were using cars."
What are you talking about? The Red Army had no fuel. Read a book FFS. Front line units in the west of the Soviet Union were basically without fuel and ammunition and few troops had ever fired their weapons.
If you're going to make these claims, you need to provide some solid evidence, like a reliable source.
"Barbarossa succeeded because Stalin sat in his bunker for 10 days giving the Red Army no orders, leaving them in dissaray."
Really? Are you completely serious? There are literally thousands of reasons why Barbarossa succeeded. Trying to pin it on mistakes by Stalin... wow, just wow. Nothing is ever that simply, much less an invasion by almost 5 million troops across a 1,000 km front.
"Their army was positioned in an offensive stance and was about to strike, when you are about to strike you put yourself in a vulnerable position, such as for example building an air base 800 meters from the enemy border, something that all good defensive strategists do, I guess........."
I don't know why you're even bothering with this nonsense. I've said it time and again: the Red Army had no fuel and little ammunition. They were in the process of re-equipping and many of the front line troops were simply untrained. Many had never fired their weapons. See Alexander Hill and 'When Titans Clashed', by David Glantz and Jonathan House.
" Just read Suvarov, it's mind opening."
I don't need to. I don't need to read a book on why the earth is flat to know it isn't.
"You people are so obsessed with Germany it's maddening."
You're the one who is talking about Germany, not me. You're not even reading what I say, are you?
You're having this argument with yourself.
"Germans also had plenty of winter clothing, you are parroting another myth designed to invoke a Napoleonic spirit."
No, I'm countering all the German myths but you're not even reading my replies. You're just assuming I'm saying things you want me to say. No wonder you don't read books.
"Soviets had plenty of fue, in fact in 1941 they had the largest fuel reserves on earth."
Source?
"Germans were not mighty or stronhg, they were smart and clever, that's why they got ahead, they used artillery to smash the Russian tanks, as they could never do so head on. The bombed airfield etc."
They outnumbered the Red Army in the West by almost 2:1 in June, 1941.
Fact.
_"They annihilated the Red Army while they were pretending nothing was happening for 10 days._"
This was limited to Stalin and some front commanders who failed to respond to the attacks. Stalin had them shot later, once he emerged from his dacha.
"This was mostly because Stalin did not want to believe Hitler would invade, as he was going to invade himself in only 1 month"
This is total nonsense. The Red Army could not have invaded because they had no means to do so and precious little supplies.
I don't normally say this but you are completely clueless.
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@GuyFierisShirt
"You are completely clueless, this is like a Westerner commenting on African internal affairs, completely ignorant."
Come up with something original, FFS. No, I'm not clueless. I just didn't get sucked in by a fantasist.
"They did outnumber the Germans along the Soviet German border 2:1, that's nonsense, they had10 times the amount of tanks, and only 6/7 the amount of men."
That's wrong. At least half the standing army was in the east. The reservists hadn't been mobilised. See Alexander Hill. You'll also find it in 'When Titans Clashed' by David Glantz and Jonathan House.
We've already been over the numbers of tanks more than once. A tank without fuel is useless. A tank with an untrained crew isn't barely useful.
"My source for everything is Stalin's Missed Chance by Mikhael Meltyukov, it offers some of the most detailed analysis for Red Army deployments before BARBAROSSA."
You're quoting him out of context.
"f you're unwilling to read Suvarov, or Hoffman, or Solonin, or any of these historians, then you are practicing cognitive dissonance."
I'd suggest you take some of your own advice and read some credible sources like Alexander Hill, David Glantz, Jonathan House, Robert Forczyk or Steve Zaloga.
I don't need to read a book about the earth being flat to know it's fantasy. I'm disinterested in reading wasting my time on fantasists. That includes you.
"You refuse to believe in this because you refuse to believe that the allies were not the good guys in WW2, unlike the reality, which states that there were no good guys in WW22, just a bunch of bad guys oif varying degrees of evil."
One thing that's clear about this is that you don't know what I think. You've spent so much time deciding what you think I believe that you haven't registered any understanding at all.
"You want to choose to live in your fantasyland, it's sad, but once you actually choose to expand your mind, you will be in a much better place."
I'm quoting - or paraphrasing - credible, well-credentialed historians. You're the one quoting fantasists, so if anyone is living in fantasy land, it's clearly not me.
"The reason they were having fuel problems was because their vehicles were sitting their without any orders, with fuel depots far away.."
Makes no difference. If the Red Army was planning an invasion, the fuel would have been at the front. How do you not get this? No, never mind. I don't need to know.
"The fuel would have been 1-2 kilometers away, if not in the same depot, but because they had no orders, no direction, they were running like chickens with their heads cut off."
The depots are irrelevant. In an attack all the supplies with be with the forward units. That includes fuel and ammunition.
"T26 was not out of date, if it were the Germans would not have been so scared to engage in 1-1 battles with it, the T26 was better than the Panzer 1, the fact that they needed FLAK CANNONS just to penetrate it's hull just reinforces this notion."
Who says they were scared to engage it? It was an infantry tank that was extremely vulnerable to the PaK 36 ‘door knocker’, for a start. The T-26 was out of date by 1941. It was out of production and was being replaced with T-34 and KV-1 types. It was clear during the Winter War that its days were numbered and it suffered quite badly. The PzKpfw I was not ever intended for anti-tank work and therefore, not comparable to the T-34. It was what was known in some armies as a 'cavalry tank'. The Soviet Equivalent was the BT series. The Allies equivalent was the M3 Stuart. None of those tanks was ever intended for tank v tank.
I have no further interest in validating your existence or continuing in flat earth arguments with you. You're talking complete nonsense and calling me names for not agreeing with you is no incentive to do otherwise. Now shove off.
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19:45 I strongly suggest you read Figes’ book on the Russian Revolution and the civil war which followed. Figes pulls no punches about things like “war communism”, a Trotskyist policy for confiscating harvested grain from peasants and the hated kulaks at gun point (and frequently worse). But he makes it pretty clear that this was less about ideology and more about the survival of the new state against the Whites, supported by a bunch of world powers, including Britain and the United States and that those armed gangs sent to fetch it from the unfortunate farmers were not so much ideologues as unemployed factory workers with a grudge and a gun.
Figes also makes it abundantly clear that the Whites were at least as brutal in their rear echelons as the Reds were accused of being. In the end, the Reds won, not because they were more brutal but because 1) they stopped shooting their deserters, resulting in more people returning to the line and 2) because the peasant farmers knew that they would not have to face the prospect of the land ceded to them after the liberation of the serfs in 1862 being returned to the hated nobility.
As brutal as the Reds were, waving a picture of Lenin doesn’t explain anything. It’s really just a dog whistle trick that gets people salivating and their economic system has nothing to do with the Russian Civil War or, indeed the start of WWII. That’s a hobby horse of yours which you are perfectly entitled to but is completely useless in an historical context.
That communism is internationalist is widely known and accepted. But at no stage did the new Soviet state attempt any kind of violent revolution in say, post-WWI Germany. As much as they hoped it would succeed, it was impossible for them to do anything other than offer moral support, yet it was Germany who made sure Lenin got to Russia. Furthermore, the new Soviet state was very different in 1924, when Lenin died from what it became 15 years later under Stalin. The difference was that the Bolsheviks were a group prepared to use violence to achieve their aims (apart from comrade Lenin himself, who preferred to remain in his apartment and leave the fighting to others...). Stalin used violence in a completely different and terrifying way.
But “murdering millions” when used in the context of Lenin is simply wrong. In the Russian Civil war an estimated 10 million died, mostly through starvation and disease but with approximately 1.3 million killed behind Red lines and 1.7 million killed behind White lines. The real killing came much later and was thus not a part of the Russian Revolution or the civil war.
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@KrissowskiM
"You and your statements are ridiculous."
Well, when you can provide documented proof (as I did) that these claims are “ridiculous” we might have something to talk about. Until then I don’t care what you think. Into the early 2000s the Polish government was pursuing Ceslaw Gaborski, commandant of Lambinowice, until his death in 2006. They also pursued Salomon Morel, camp commandant of Swietochlowice on similar matters.
Show me where this is wrong, false, ridiculous or bs, or any other dismissive comment you have made. In other words. prove to me that Ceslaw Gaborski wasn't going to be tried a by a court in Poland (except that he died before he could take the stand). Show me Lambinowice wasn't a camp where atrocities took place. Same for Swietlowice. Show me how Salomon Morel wasn't under investigation by Polish authorities for atrocities committed there.
What would you say to the Polish officials who were pursuing these men? That they are "haters"? That they hate Poles? That they are flat earthers? Would you say they have "religion hate towards Poles"?
I don't hate Poles. I hate nationalists. For me to hate Poles that would mean they are all nationalists like you, which they are not. My point, which you have consistently ignored, is that no country is completely clean. Including Poland. Not even my own country is completely clean. Doesn't change my attitude.
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Sorry but this is starting to wear thin. It's not that I disagree. I'm just bored with idealism and dogma. I don't want to hear any more of it. If you've got something to say then say it but please leave the political purity out of it. Sorry Lewis but it's boring. And from a historical perspective, these "everybody knows it doesn't work" arguments are pointless. History doesn't care about economic theory and hypothesis. History cares about what happened. Please, just drop it. And for pity's sake, stop quoting Mises.
That's that unpleasantness out of the way.
The Soviet Union lost seven years of economic growth out of WWII, not to mention 27 million people. But by the mid-1950s, the Soviet economy was growing at three times the rate of the US economy, which was, itself, pretty prosperous. That's how the Soviet Union could afford its space program. I'm not going to argue that figures weren't fudged or that growth of this magnitude is easy to contain. But a country that had been through what it had and was doing what it was doing was actually travelling pretty well.
Almost certainly, a major part of this was to do with the numbers of people who were now literate. At the end of the Czarist era, only about 25% of the population was literate. This had pretty serious implications for Stalin's crash industrialisation program. It also had implications for the Red Army, particularly the officer corps and particularly after the Purges (see Alexander Hill, "The Red Army and the Second World War")..
But by the mid-1950s, 30 years after the formation of the Soviet Union, a lot of children of the 1920s were old enough to be managing factories, etc. This was the flow on effect of universal education. Another book to read is Vladislav Zubok's book "A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev".
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@GuyFierisShirt
"The Soviet Union before Barbarossa had around 5 times the amount of planes, 7 times the amount of tanks,6 times more divisions, 3 times the amount of cars etc as the Germans, they put all of their stuff on the frontlines ready for an invasion"
The numbers hardly tell the story. Very few of these aircraft, tanks etc were modern: Polkarpovs, T-26s, etc. Furthemore, they had almost no fuel and almost no ammunition (See "The Red Army and the Second World War", Alexander Hill, Cambridge University Press, 2017 pp. 189- 191).
"Worse however in many ways than for many munitions was the situation with fuels and lubricants that could prevent functioning tanks - even with inadequate munitions - from actually engaging the enemy. The 33rd Tank Division of the Western Special Military District reported for example that for 18 June it had only 15 per cent supply for 1st grade petrol and 4 per cent for automobile fuel, and for Diesel fuel it had 0 per cent. The situation for 33rd Tank Division was not as bad as it got - 31st Tank Division of the Pribaltic Military Division had it even worse with only 2 per cent of required automobile fuel and no Diesel." Ibid.
Now please show me where you got this claim that the Germans had no fuel because my recollection is that, while fuel was always a critical factor for both sides, it was not as critical for the Germans until after the raids on Ploesti.. Using hoses to pull wagons, artillery, etc, is not an indication that they were short of fuel. The fact is that the vast majority of references on German Army logistics say that they simply had not transitioned, despite the propaganda movies showing highly mechanised forces.
Incidentally, controlling the Baku oil fields, while useful, clearly did not solve the problem any more than having an expensive car makes you a better driver.
"Explain why the entire Soviet economy in June 1941 was FOCUSED on bringing goods to the border."
I can find zero evidence that this claim is anything more than a bluff - whether it's your bluff or Keitel's or Suvorov's doesn't matter.
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@GuyFierisShirt
"I found the exact numbes. Red Army and NKVD on the 22th of July 1941:"
That's nice. What's the source for this? What about the lack of fuel and ammunition? Having "25 784 tank and tankettes" is all very well but first of all, most were outdated T-26s or light cavalry tanks (the Red Army still used that term, as did the French) like the BT-5 and BT-7, which were not intended for troop support. Without fuel and ammunition, they weren't much use.
"6 114 700 personnel before general mobilization"
No, that was the 1937 plan which envisaged that number (actually 6,826,642) after full mobilisation. That doesn't mean there were that many in uniform. MP-41 envisaged 8,682,827 after full mobilisation. (See Alexander Hill, pp. 192-93) At no stage were these numbers ever actually reached
On 22 June, 1941, Red Army strength stood at about 2.8 million in the West, facing a force of 3.9 million.
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@GuyFierisShirt
"Explain why you would mobilize your entire air force at the border of another country if you don't plan on invading said country."
Where did the last invasion come from?
Hill, in particular, goes into quite a bit of detail on this. Stalin was very concerned about mobilisation and sending a signal to the Germans before the Red army was ready for them.
"Explain why Stalin in 1941 said in a speech to cadets about how he was going to invade."
Source?
"Explain why Stalin himself in secret communications said talked about stuff like ''the plan is set in motion'',"
Which "plan"? What's the source for this claim?
"Explain why..."
"Explain why..."
"Explain why..."
This is like arguing with a creationist. They have a simple explanation - the the Earth is the centre of the universe and that the firmaments were created in seven days by a supreme being (let's call that being God) and that's all you need to know. People were burnt at the stake for daring to question that belief. Atheists waste inordinate amounts of time trying to regurgitate hundreds of years of scientific research to counter a simplistic faith-based claim. Any fool can ask a question that the wisest can't answer but you don't build a cohesive argument that way, any more than you can win a war with a purely defensive strategy.
Well, I can be the fool too.
Explain why the Soviet Union planned early to move a huge number of factories east of the Urals. Explain why they already had plans to move the government to Samara in the event that Moscow fell.
Then explain how an army with almost no experienced officers (after the purge), a poor combat record against both Finland and Poland, no access to rail transport (the Soviet Union still used the old Russian broad gauge while everywhere else in eastern Europe was standard gauge) and led by commanders who were unable to make a decision for fear of being shot, could mount an invasion on eastern Europe and Germany after seeing what the Wehrmacht had done in Poland, France, and the low countries.
Then explain to me how Stalin was taken by surprise. He allowed German military units to cross the border on the pretext of trying to find graves from the First World War - they were doing surveys - and did not trust the advice from his top spy in Tokyo (Richard Sorge) or British intelligence, preferring to believe in a perfidious Albion instead.
Explain how Stalin allowed a Tripartite pact to be signed, which potentially committed the Soviet Union to war on two fronts if he was planning to go westwards.
In the end, Stalin did not trust any of his advisors. According to Norman Stone, the only person Stalin trusted was Adolf Hitler. When the attack came, Molotov asked the German Ambassador, "What have we done to deserve this?" The answer was simple: Hitler had made it clear in Mein Kampf that "the threat of Jewish Bolshevism" would be destroyed and the Slavic people would be enslaved to the needs of a pan-German state, with emphasis on Lebensraum and the food supply from the Ukraine.
The claim of a pre-emptive strike has, in the words of this very video (did you watch it?), become the bulwark for Hitler apologists and neo-Nazis.
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@GuyFierisShirt
"The red army's officer base became competent towards the end of the winter war after Stalin saw what kind of a disaster was brewing because of their incompetence, that's how they were able to quickly win it towards the end but were terribly stalled at the beginning."
This sounds like a post hoc ergo, propter hoc argument. Either way, it's no proof either way that there was any intent to invade eastern Europe.
"Nobody is saying that Hitler's strike was preemptive, the Nazis had planned for some time to attack the USSR, just like the USSR had for some time planned to attack the world."
That's absolutely what you ard everyone else is saying. Now you want to make it a post hoc ergo, propter hoc argument, I'm not the slightest bit surprised. The list of conspiracy theories today is almost completely limitless: claims of engineered pandemics, fake Covid cures, Moon landing conspiracies, flat-earthers, the list is almost endless. I can't believe that a society so spoilt by the almost limitless availability of information today can so easily and willingly fall for such rubbish.
All of this against a welter of scientific or historical research done by people like David Glantz, who has made it his life's work is beyond comprehension.
That it's now so common for people to fall for Soviet invasion theories for an army that was incapable of efficiently invading Finland and Poland, lacking in all necessary supplies and without competent and experienced leaders, could even consider such an operation is beyond my comprehension.
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@GuyFierisShirt
"These things happen because of an insane ideology and unhinged leaders who thought that what they were doing was for the greater good, and to preserve their own hides/enrich themselves."
Try telling that to those who followed it and those who even today, still believe in it. Russia has enough trouble today with communists and neo-Stalinists.
What most people have is the stories of those who left. Nobody leaves their homeland without good reason. Who today really knows what Soviet citizens who stayed thought? Very few. And nobody wants to know. Ukrainians hate Russians, not just today but for centuries. During the Soviet era and particularly the Stalin era, that hatred was multiplied many fold by things like the Holodomor - a piece of deadly spite, costing several million lives, against Ukrainian nationalists who hated being ruled by Moscow.
Then do a Google search for an ethnic distribution map of the former Soviet Union. It looks like a patchwork quilt and with each border, friction, always friction. And so it has been since the break up. Clashes over Nagorno Karabakh, the ongoing conflict over the Donbass region and the dispute between Russia and Georgia for starters.
That is why Stalin clamped down on nationalism. I think we agree on that. But don't think for a minute the grudges went away. Things took a turn for the worse during the war when Soviet troops defected to the Nazis. In places recently absorbed, like the Baltic states, it was easy to understand. In other places, less so.
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“Socialist imperialism”? Jesus Christ, Tik. It’s hard to know where to start with this. Let’s start in 1919, because before that, Poland as a formal country, with borders, didn’t exist. The Brest-Litovsk treaty ceded large tracts of both Belorussia and Ukraine to the new state. Now, the rights and wrongs of this don’t matter. What matters is that it stirred up a certain amount of dissatisfaction among those Belarusian and Ukrainian citizens who suddenly found themselves under Polish rule - something they hated. To be completely fair, they didn’t like being under Moscow rule either and for much the same reasons. But at least they had some local levels of autonomy, the results of which later contributed, in part, to the Holodomor.
This is why, when you read Alexander Hill’s book, ”The Red Army in the Second World War” you will find that there were many places in eastern Poland where the Red Army were treated as liberators. Sure, there were other places where the shooting started but it was very different from the invasion by the Nazis in the West. This is the only reason the official Soviet history could call it a war of liberation.
Secondly, if you read Fest’s biography of Hitler, you will find that Hitler’s expansionist philosophy had next to nothing to do with socialist ideology and everything to do with pan-German nationalism. Now, you’re an intelligent man so you would undoubtedly be aware of the large ethnic German populations in the Ukraine and eastern Russia. These were the communities Hitler sought to link up with to create the pan-German state. Nothing to do with a “socialist paradise.” That came later with East Germany.
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@blasterelforg7276
"Compare how well the Ukrainians had it in Poland vs the Soviet Union."
If you read about it, the invasion in the east of Poland was rather different from that of the West. In a lot of cases, the locals welcomed the Red Army in. While it was by no means universal, it rather gives the lie to your claim.
"Russia also had no legit claims to either Ukraine and Belarus."
Of course they did. They were part of the Russian Empire.
"In 1919-20 Poland also wanted to set up an independent Ukrainian state comprising central and eastern Ukraine, and such state was proclaimed, but this pissed off Russia which invaded this now independent Ukraine supported by Poland and violently annexed it."
This is a remarkably skewed version of events. There were several border skirmishes between the two and I am continually amazed that people bother to take sides the way they do. I know everyone loves to hate "Russia" (be it Russia or the former Soviet Union) and humans naturally gravitate to a polemic etc., but anyone who seriously thinks they have a handle on ethnic tensions in that part of the world is seriously dreaming. Or worse.
This is why I said I wasn't interested in the rights and wrongs of the matter. Unless you can divorce yourself from making judgements, it's really hard to get an accurate picture, especially in a part of the world where ethnic nationalism is so strong. They're born to it.
"Then later, since Russia was denied the opportunity to annex Eastern Poland after refusing to enter Czechoslovakia through Romania, they signed an alliance with Hitler instead."
Qui bono? By the way, the Soviet Union was not the same as Russia.
"This included military alliance and thereafter trade deals and close cooperation between Gestapo and the NKVD concerning ethnic cleansing of the newly conquered lands."
Please cite documented evidence of a link between the NKVD and the Gestapo (something other than Wikipedia).
"This is the key difference between Russia and Poland- unlike Russia, Poland did not engage in ethnic cleansing."
Rubbish. Read what happened after the end of the war. All of Eastern Europe was engaged in ethnic cleansing. No, don't blame the Soviet Union or Stalin or "Russia". This was done entirely at a local level and was as nasty as it gets. Read Keith Lowe's book "Savage Continent" (seen next to Tik's left ear in this video).
You think Poland didn't engage in some ethnic cleansing of her own? Think again. The Czechs, the Yugoslavs, the Romanians, Hungary... the lot. They were all in on it. They all booted any ethnic Germans out of their country and in many cases they did much worse. Armed gangs roamed the countryside, murdering and looting. Houses were burnt with people inside.
To apportion all of this to the Soviet Union (or "Russia") is just ignorant and naïve. nothing is ever that simple.
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@blasterelforg7276
”The Germans were booted out of East Prussia and western Poland because the Soviet Union wanted more land and decided to shift all populations westward.”
No, that isn’t what happened. The Soviet Union could not simply randomly shift the borders 200 kms west. That was determined at the Yalta conference in 1945. The borders, it was agreed, would move 200 kms westwards. Remember that Poland had only formally existed since 1919 anyway. All it did was to move the eastern border back to approximately where the Curzon line was. This was believed to provide a better ethnic balance. It was less about territory under Soviet control because they already controlled what became East Germany.
Booting Germans out had nothing to do with the Soviet Union and everything to do with local nationalists. The Soviets didn’t care who lived there. Why would they? They cared where the border was.
”Poland did not practice ethnic cleansing.”
Read ”Savage Continent” by Keith Lowe. Every country in Eastern Europe practiced ethnic cleansing at the end of WWII. Poland was one of the more notable examples. Now, if you have a reference to prove that it never happened, I’d be interested in seeing what it is.
”the Russians think ethnic cleansing is A-ok because it was once done to the Germans in 1945, when Russian soldiers allegedly raped 2 million German women btw.”
Yes, I’ve read Anonyma. Have you?
You can’t talk about this incredibly complex matter without talking about the Nazi attitude to Soviet citizens, 18 million of whom died during occupation by Nazi forces. How many of those do you reckon were raped? How many times? The Nazis had every intention of using “the Slavs” as slaves for pan-German benefit. Everywhere they went they murdered them by the thousands. The Soviet republic of Belarus lost about 25% of its population because of Nazi brutality.
Now let’s talk about Red Army soldiers. Nine million died during the war, more than half of them - something like 5 million - in captivity. Nazi treatment of Soviet POWs was appalling. Are you going to just sweep that under the carpet? Now, I’m not saying this justifies the Red Army behaviour in Germany at the end of the war but you’re talking about this as though it happened in isolation. It didn’t.
Now let’s look at some terminology. The terms “Russia” and “the Soviet Union” are not interchangeable. There is no better example of this than the one you quoted about “Russian” soldiers raping German women. The vast majority of the Red Army troops in eastern Germany at the end of the war were from Belarus and the Ukraine. There were very few actual Russians. What this does is highlight what you don’t know.
Sometime what you’ve got nothing better to do, I suggest you have a look at an ethnic distribution map of Eastern Europe. Then you tell me how you’d manage it. There are pockets of ethnic communities all over the place and every one of them has their own version of events. Every one of them believes that they are right and the other guy is wrong. There are ethnic German communities as far east as the Donbass region.
At the end of the war, the continent was divided into two parts; that controlled by the United States and that which was controlled by the Soviet Union. The trouble with the western view is that it views Eastern Europe in the same way as it views Western Europe: largely homogeneous. This error in thinking is pretty easy to illustrate. Have a look at what happened to the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, when Slobodan Milosevic was running Serbia and Franco Tudman was running Croatia. A community which was thought by the west to be largely homogeneous was split apart by violent nationalism. In case you’re thinking that was all Milosevic’s fault, think again. Look at the example of the Serbian police officers in the Croatian town of Bihac who were forced to wear the sahovnica - the flag of the hated ustache - on their uniforms.
That’s just an example of how Eastern Europe is riven by ethnic differences. Do you want to take a position on that?
My point is that taking sides in this - in your case, blaming what you call “the Russians” for everything - is naive and in a good many cases, just plain wrong. The identity of the rapists at the end of the war is a good example of that. But it’s a very typical American attitude.
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@blasterelforg7276
”That’s a fascist mentality.”
It wasn’t my idea, old mate. As I said, it was believed this would provide a better ethnic mix than the way things were. There were lots of ethnic Ukrainians in eastern Poland who had no interest in being ruled by Warsaw because, under Polish rule, they were treated as second class citizens. Same for Belarus. Same for Poles living in western Ukraine.
The irony of all of this is that, ultimately, it was fascism, to a degree. Most people don’t actually know what fascism is. If you read Kevin Passmore’s excellent little book on the subject, you will find that fascism, while difficult to define, has one common theme: nationalism.
And nationalism is at the crux of the whole problem. Ethnic nationalism in Eastern Europe was a local problem, with squabbles that came and went. Hitler made it a continental problem and it’s still with us in that form today. The ethnic divisions in Eastern Europe exist today because of Hitler’s nationalism. Read Keith Lowe.
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I think the section about the possibility of the regime falling is slightly flawed. There's always these assumptions like, 'If Moscow had fallen it would have been all over for the Soviet Union'. You cleared this up and then, in the same vein, the question of the regime falling was also tackled. If you listen to American predictions, they assume that everyone will behave the way their revolutionaries did in the 18th century and rise up and overthrow the government. It's also assumed that this will be a better outcome. Neither is necessarily true and in most cases it isn't true at all. You hear it from the US State Department all the time. They predicted it for Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. More recently, we've heard it about Putin. The only time this has happened - as it did with Ghaddafi and Saddam - was when the opposition was so strong that the country was already falling. This was, of course not the case with the Soviet Union.
Where I disagree is when you said, 'Stalin doesn't care', I think that's only superficially true. Stalin knew that numbers counted and the numbers available weren't going favourably when you consider how much territory was being lost. So, while you said Moscow and the Caucasus were the two things which, when combined, they couldn't afford to lose together, they equally couldn't afford to lose people and territory together.
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@madtechnocrat9234
"you can just call everyone who is not democratic a proto-fascists?"
That's a largely American definition. Fascism ultimately, is not democratic but fascism is a form of extreme nationalism and racism. In the context of the time and the climate of nationalism that existed in Poland at the time, I'd say I'm still pretty close.
"Fascism is very distinct ideology focused mainly around nationality, ethno-nationality to be precise and a state as a final form of said nationality, it is not simply authoritarianism."
Agreed. You have a good understanding of fascism from my perspective. But I can think of no fascist groups which are democratic. History suggests they're not either. Watching eastern Europe slide back into authoritarianism and single party states, it's pretty easy to see the same racist/nationalist themes behind it.
"Had it not for the outcome of world war 1 it could have never existed..."
Fascism has been around longer than that. It really started with a political border dispute between France and Italy in the late 19th Century.
"Democratic or not, it was our rightful government, becouse it was OUR government, not installed by any foreign power."
But that's just it: it wasn't. The election was a sham and the process was done without electoral authority.
"Furthermore you severely downplay how much it was support by the people. Piłsudski to this day is considered a hero by literaly all sides in this country. (Except few far-rightwing radicals)"
Fascism frequently has the support of the vast majority. Look at Italy. Look at Nazi Germany. When you advocate nationalist ideals, it's easy to implement anti-democratic systems and we are seeing that today.
"Legitimacy is not on paper, it is in hearts and minds of people."
Legitimacy is the result of due process. There is no other way to determine this than the electoral process. We don't have an alternative. When people start claiming to speak for the majority - or worse, the "silent majority" - you know they are trying to circumvent democracy.
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@madtechnocrat9234
"Well, in my eyes American defintion is sh*t then"
Why don't you just calm down? I didn't say I agreed with it. I even agreed with your version. What I said was that fascism historically has not been democratic. In that respect it isn't much different from communism. That's not supposed to be dictatorial either but it usually is.
"You can have extreme nationalism and racism in a democracy."
Yes but I've yet to see a democratic fascist government because in fascism, everything and everyone is subordinated to the state (trust me, I hate talking about political ideology).
"Or even by British concentration camps in africa long before Germans came up with that sh*t. "
Will you calm the fuck down? Those British concentration camps were under military rule and that too is incompatible with democracy. On that basis you could argue that jails are fascist.
"On top of that democracy can be a tyranny if certain laws are removed... nothing would stop majority from voting on executing someone for example."
Sure it can. There are lots of ways governments can become tyrannical. Try the military juntas of South America in the latter half of the 20th century. Were they fascist? Not necessarily. Were they tyrannical? You bet they were. They're still digging up the bodies.
"Except it was less authoritarian and more oligarchic."
Well, if authoritarian and democratic are opposites then oligarchic shares more with authoritarianism than it does with democracy.
"Yes, but it was done by Polish politicians, not by outside forces."
And they set the process up for exactly that purpose: so that they could make executive decisions without due process. That is not democratic, no matter how you look at it. Doesn't matter who does it.
"Which for example instalation of soviet puppet government in Poland wasn't."
Who were also Poles. What's the difference?
"I would, however expect you would consider king a legitimate ruler of some country, despite of lack of any electoral process. Am i wrong?"
I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. The Queen of Great Britain is a legitimate ruler but she works within the framework of a democracy. She's the Head of State in the same way that a president is except that she's not elected. But in actual fact, she's a rubber stamp because all the executive decisions are made by elected officials.
Is it legitimate? The constitution of Great Britain and Northern Ireland recognises it.
Do I agree with it? No.
Now, if you want to continue this discussion, I respectfully ask that you lower the tone a bit or you can argue with your monitor instead.
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There is, of course, no right or wrong answer to this. However, you've neatly highlighted a blind spot in Western understanding of the Eastern Front. However, rather than starting from a purely military base, the Eastern Front needs to start with one admission by anyone who genuinely seeks to understand it: most of us know nothing about the Soviet Union or its republics. We just think we do.
As one who has read a lot of Soviet history, from the Russian Revolution to the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991, I can say that I know very little. I've barely scratched the surface. Churchill described the Soviet Union as "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". He wasn't wrong.
The whole Eastern front is much, much harder to understand than the war in the West. Anyone who has ever seen an ethnic distribution map of the Soviet Union can see how complicated the political divisions were and the extent to which Hitler's politics of division exploited nationalist ambitions in so many places. It remains so even today.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Map_of_the_ethnic_groups_living_in_the_Soviet_Union.jpg
So when I see simplistic comments about how it was just numbers that won and Red army commanders didn't care about their casualties, or that same old quote that gets trotted out all the time, "Quantity has a quality all its own", I'm reminded that Western ignorance hasn't changed. The very notion that this could be summed up so simply is a joke and it just gets repeated ad nauseam and people are either gullible enough, ill-informed enough, smug enough, stupid enough or a combination of all four to believe they have the big picture. They are sadly wrong.
One book I highly recommend is "The Red Army in the Second World War" by Alexander Hill:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/red-army-and-the-second-world-war/2E01D8047C13AE63A3A92D6DEE2CD71F
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The tactics you refer to were known at the time as "Hutier tactics". They were originally proposed by a Frenchman, called Capitaine Laffargue, in 1915. Contrary to popular belief, they were not first used by Hutier at Riga but by General Aleksei Brusilov in the eponymous Brusilov Offensive in 1916. This is the problem with the lack of information (in English, at least) on the Eastern Front in WWI. While Brusilov sustained pretty heavy casualties in his implementation of these tactics, he was ultimately quite successful. Contrast that with the contemporary Battle of the Somme... Stormtrooper tactics were just infiltration tactics, mostly at a squad or platoon level.
The difference between what was done in WWI and what Rommel did in WWII is that Rommel fought as a division (I have a source for this comment).
There's no good comparing this with Napoleon either. One of the key concepts of all of this is that Laffargue built his idea around the concept of a rolling artillery barrage. That required accurately sighted guns firing reliable long range ammunition which would (theoretically) land just ahead of the advancing troops. Too long and the barrage is wasteful and may be ineffective. Too short and well... you get the idea. It could not be done with a Napoleonic muzzle loader.
In any case, the Germans get the credit for a lot of things they didn't invent. This is just one example. They might have implemented these things well, they might even have improved them to the point that they became much more effective. But they didn't invent them. It's just part of the same od thing where we, in the West, for reasons only we know, believe everything the Germans tell us. That goes for WWI and double for WWII.
So, without a more in depth understanding of the French campaign of 1940, it's easy to see German superiority in tactics, command structure and worst of all, technical aspects such as weapons, when in fact, this is still largely the product of German wartime propaganda. It's certainly true that their victory in 1940 stunned the world, no one more so than the British. But nobody was in any doubt about what they were doing or how they were doing it. It's just that their success was magnified by a number of command structural failures within the French army. It just happened that the Germans were, in 1940, the polar opposite in philosophy and it worked. Make no mistake about it: the German operation of 1940 were extremely high risk. There were in infinite number of things that could have gone wrong and completely reversed their fortunes. The campaign was not decided by German superiority but but a whole bunch of factors.
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