Comments by "Alan Pennie" (@alanpennie8013) on "TIKhistory" channel.

  1.  @TheImperatorKnight  I think what the French wanted was not money but coal (the Germans had wrecked many of their nines in WW1). When the Germans didn't deliver the French tried to collect the coal themselves by occupying The Ruhr, but this failed because of the strike.
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  2. There were some really radical possibilities, like exposing the agricultural sector to foreign competition. But this wouldn't have been too popular. The famous Osthilfe scandal was a gesture in this direction.
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  3. Pity. I have looked and there don't appear to be any representations of MEFO bills online
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  4.  @TheImperatorKnight  Don't pay any attention to this poster The (very brief) mention of you in the D - Day video wasn't at all hostile.
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  5.  @billandreastv1166  Hmm. Well if this was the view it was soon altered. After WW2 many thousands of Ukrainians were settled in The UK and Canada.
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  6.  @kentamitchell  Way too high for The Gulag. Holodomor is a dubious construct of Ukrainian nationalism. The famine was by no means confined to Ukraine. In fact losses may have been higher in Kazakhstan as a %age of population.
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  7. Exactly. They are equally to blame. There are some remarkable comments above by David Rendall suggesting that they were really not that concerned about Arnhem and had an entirely different conception of the battle from the official plan. A suggestion worth following up.
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  8.  @lukebruce5234  Getty is very good. I think only now is the Great Terror coming into focus because this bizarre self - destructive episode requires a lot of explanation.
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  9. Landing on both sides of the bridge would seem to be a good idea.
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  10.  @lucashurkmans2206  It's better to report that the Germans sat there were huge losses. We don't have reliable figures.
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  11.  @lucashurkmans2206  The consensus seems to be that the first offensive (October - November)was a serious attempt to crush the Germans, the later ones holding operations. But the losses in the later offensives do seem high. (Krivosheev reports 30,000 "irrecoverable losses"). If most of the casualties were Latvian conscipts it may be the Soviets weren't too concerned to minimise casualties.
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  12.  @lucashurkmans2206  Hope you're right. It would really suck to be a Latvian killed in Courland wearing Soviet uniform.
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  13. Immediately attacked (and probably destroyed) The Kwantung Army in Manchuria. That's why The Japanese didn't do it.
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  14.  @dawidlijewski5105  The Polish - Lithuanian Commonwealth was still a thing in UK if nowhere else.
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  15. The different railway gauge in Russia was a huge problem. Every inch of track had to be laboriously converted before German rolling stock could be used.
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  16. No you're correct. The Poles made it very clear after Munich that they weren't going to join in Hitler's war for Lebensraum, but up to March Hitler still hoped they'd come around, and the Brits feared that they might.
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  17. The British had just begun a bombing campaign against Germany when The Armistice was signed.
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  18.  @chrisyorke6175  In recent years people have been more inclined to accept that Bomber Command played an important role in winning the war (or winning it more quickly).
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  19.  @68walter  Not since 1940. But they were before.
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  20. It only seems strange if you're not thinking clearly, probably because you're a deranged anti - Communist.
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  21.  @fazole  They would have been pretty severe (around 6% of German GNP) if they had actually been paid.
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  22. It was afraid of the effect on US public opinion if Germany had renounced its alliance with Japan.
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  23. sami parkonnen I believe the Finnish Reds were originally even more nationalist and irredentist than The Whites. But after they were defeated their leaders were mostly in exile in The USSR so they had to change their tune.
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  24. Very true. If countries want to fight wars they have to run deficits.
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  25.  @grekusPotatus  Much of my argument is based on, How War Came, by D.C. Watt. It's a bit long and repetitive, but well argued I think. You might like to check it out.
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  26. He did. But as he also said there was also a mass release of prisoners because they couldn't be fed in the camps.
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  27. Nowadays it's a British intelligence base. Perhaps it was the same then.
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  28.  @QuizmasterLaw  Interesting that the Anglo - Americans did protect citizens of The Baltic States. Presumably because they did not recognize their annexation by The USSR.
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  29. It's standard Western usage now I'm afraid.
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  30. There was an interesting historical debate about all this in the late 1980s, and the consensus was that Germany did not face immediate collapse but that ambitious plans for further rearmament (like building up a ocean - going navy) could not be carried out without foreign conquests.
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  31.  @thevillaaston7811  There's fairly good evidence that negotiations were conducted in Sweden about a separate peace. See Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms. From Stalin's pov it was a win/win. Either he would get the Germans out of the USSR without further fighting or the Anglo - Americans would be more amenable to his demands.
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  32.  @TheImperatorKnight  There's one by Ingeborg Fleischhauer. But it's in German.
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  33. That's a good point. The badness of the roads must have limited the usefulness of the trucks
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  34. You can certainly blame him for the way he shifted blame to Lindquist, apparently enlisting others to do some smearing on his behalf.
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  35. I'd say keep the original narrative and pin, because this is interesting from an historiographic pov. Remarkable that so many years later there should still be such uncertainty about casualties. Take no notice of haters. It's very obvious to sensible folk that you are completely honest.
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  36.  @charlietipton8502  What is shabby is the shifting of blame to Lindquist. Fortunately it doesn't seem to have damaged his career.
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  37. Yes. I do think it's important that the Americans didn't intentionally target civilians . However attacking a train station in the middle of a densely populated town pretty much guaranteed heavy casualties.
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  38. You more inclined to read Luther probably.
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  39.  @climberly  It's simply a fact that Luther was a raging anti-Semite.
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  40. According to Richard Sreigmann - Gall, who is the main authority on these matters, Confessional Lutherans were most likely to embrace Nazi values of all the German churches.
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  41. Most likely they had been conscripted into The Wehrmacht and then defected to The Allies.
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  42.  @KarakNornClansman  It's sad to see this casual dismissal of Solzhenitsyn. Obviously his account has the limited perspective of all memoir but had experienced The Gulag himself and could give an authentic account of what it felt like.
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  43. You could call wartime Japan fascist in the generic sense (combine a policy of aggression abroad and repression at home) but apart from that it didn't much resemble its allies.
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  44. Steve in the Mountains Why wouldn't they? He would tell his comrades that if they cooperation with the enemy after capture they might well be released.
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  45.  @michaelharvey75  Steven Kotkin is very good. Not perfect but much better than any previous Anglophone biographer.
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  46.  @caryblack5985  Particularly since he was so cooperative, as prisoners tend to be. Surprising that he knew so much considering his lowly rank.
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  47.  @82dorrin  The latter, I would think.
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  48. Ridgway The Rigid.
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  49.  @Xfire209  Exactly. The Gestapo responded to delation by neighbors.
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  50. There is absolutely none.
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