World War I & II topic

Btw I'm no expert on the issue but I don't see D-Day as being late, or early. It just was when it was. Second front was open in 1943, more than half of Kingdom of Yugoslavia's territory was under control of allied forces by then, together with vast majority of the Adriatic.
 
Churchill believed a 1943 invasion would have been repulsed. I'm not so sure, but I am pretty sure it would have been a much more violent and dangerous affair.
 
t66aNJ1SvqTPFfBIE70CDNOjpbqpcO1xtB7ewH1ZTVM.jpg


I mean...you cannot explain this in any possible way than Hollywood propaganda.
If you want to make, not just USA but the whole world a better place, delete Hollywood. I don't know how but just do it.
 
Zare said:
I mean...you cannot explain this in any possible way than Hollywood propaganda.
If you want to make, not just USA but the whole world a better place, delete Hollywood. I don't know how but just do it.
Click to expand...
Well, yeah. Not to denigrate the achievements of Americans or other Allied nations, but the USSR did the heavy lifting in terms of fighting and dying.

You can make an argument that the UK and USA supported the USSR in terms of materiel that allowed them to do same, but yeah.
 
The thing is, and I’m not defending this, you can’t make a war film successful in America if Americans aren’t involved. Just look at the domestic box office for Dunkirk for example. Very modest success and quickly forgotten.
 
Mosh said:
The thing is, and I’m not defending this, you can’t make a war film successful in America if Americans aren’t involved. Just look at the domestic box office for Dunkirk for example. Very modest success and quickly forgotten.
Click to expand...
Enemy at the Gates is another, barely broke even, and I thought it was quite a good film with a superb cast.
 
Perun said:
Stalin had been asking for a second front in the west ever since the Americans entered the war. Technically, it was even a third front, because the Allies had been fighting in Italy since 1943. Rome had been captured two days before D-Day. Moreover, I'm sure Stalin would have been happy had he gotten some support in taking Berlin. The effort to take it was tremendous, and the battle for and in Berlin left over a million people dead.
Click to expand...

Saw a documentary years ago which pointed out that Stalin was getting impatient with the U.S, thinking they were fucking with him, because they kept delaying their direct involvement.
 
LooseCannon said:
Well, yeah. Not to denigrate the achievements of Americans or other Allied nations, but the USSR did the heavy lifting in terms of fighting and dying.

You can make an argument that the UK and USA supported the USSR in terms of materiel that allowed them to do same, but yeah.
Click to expand...
In fairness, the USSR had by far and away the most men available to do all the fighting and dying
 
Wogmidget said:
In fairness, the USSR had by far and away the most men available to do all the fighting and dying
Click to expand...

Which is why Hitler's paranoia is just mystifying. He basically had taken over Europe, had cornered the U.K on its island, but when Churchill didn't surrender, he figured it was because he would be back stabbed by Stalin. Stalin was expecting it from Hitler, though. But Europe was DONE. Hitler had to go and poke the bear.
 
LooseCannon said:
Even if you combined the manufacturing capacity of every Axis country, the US dwarfed them all.
Click to expand...

True, not denying this at all. Without US support, the Soviets wouldn't have had the industrial capacity they ended up having.
 
Perun said:
True, not denying this at all. Without US support, the Soviets wouldn't have had the industrial capacity they ended up having.
Click to expand...
Which is why both sides in the dispute are wrong. Neither could have won the way they did without the other. I remember someone asking me what America's greatest contribution to the war was, and surely they were expecting D-Day or the bomb or the defeat of Japan, and my response was "28 million pairs of felt boots." The Soviet soldier might have done the killing to defeat Hitler, but he marched from Stalingrad to Berlin in boots that were sewn in the United States.
 
Perfectly agree on this.
One of the major strokes of luck that Stalin had was that Japan couldn't be bothered to attack the Soviets. The US were much better equipped to fight both wars than the USSR.
 
His food was pulled to the front in 750,000 GMC trucks, and by 10,000 US-made locomotives...the list goes on.

Japan made their decision not to fuck with the USSR after Khalkhin Gol. The Soviets showed up with more men, more (and better) tanks, more airplanes, and a much better general. Despite inflicting greater casualties on the Soviets, the Japanese were nonetheless defeated, decisively. As soon as the USSR got into trouble with the Germans, they hastened to make it known that they had no desires to take Vladivostok, which freed up the Russian eastern armies to head west - but also freed up Japanese Manchurian forces to work deeper into China, and the navy in the Sea of Japan to operate against the USA.

I think in the scheme of things, the Japanese looked at what they could get from the USSR - Vladivostok and a couple islands and a bunch of Siberia - and decided it was better to gamble on more resources from the South Pacific and China. Obviously the logical choice, though still a poor choice as fighting the USA was essentially a death sentence.
 
Today 75 years ago Warsaw Uprising started, a Polish attempt to secure their capital before Soviets roll in. Soviets did not roll in at all, leaving Poles to the mercy of Wehrmacht.

The Polish insurgency and the Warsaw Uprising are often wrongly cited as the biggest resistance and the biggest resistance battle in the WW2. At the time of the Uprising, Yugoslav Partisans were 500.000 strong and went through series of battles (7) against the Axis as a whole (lead by Nazis, supported by all their Balkan puppets). The most important one, Battle of Sutjeska (Case Black / Fall Schwarz) in May/June 1943 had 130 thousand Axis attack 20 thousand Yugoslav Partisans out in the mountains.
 
At this time eighty years ago, Neville Chamberlain announced on the radio that the United Kingdom was in a state of war with Germany after it had failed to withdraw from Poland.

Good Times.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top