72 replies to this topic

[Nukelavee]

oh, that's kinda cool.

off to wiki and stuff

[Roose Bolton's Pet Leech]

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Umm, if either the USSR or the US were factored out, the war wouldn't have been won. The USSR blunted the Wermacht, and pushed it back, but this would have hardly been possible without land lease and the diversion of a massive amount of German resources west (Resources more than manpower, before you correct me). From the production of submarines (700 of them), anti-aircraft weapons (80,000 of them), and the destruction of 80% of the luftwaffe in the west (50% of it was directly diverted west). That does not include manpower, troops, tanks, production falls from bombings, etc..

And Land lease represented 14% of the Soviet war effort, but since it focused on fields the Soviets were bad at producing (or mining), it allowed the Soviets to streamline their production, thus representing a far higher direct contribution to the Soviets than 14%. I would not discount this.

The Soviets themselves put lend-lease's contribution at 4%, but I'll happily admit that the US, UK, and assorted Allies war-efforts made life easier for Moscow. I just think that in a straight Germany (and Italy, and under-the-table Spanish) fight versus the Soviets, the latter would have still won, just have taken longer to do it.

[Roose Bolton's Pet Leech]

DornishKnight, on 22 March 2012 - 02:02 PM, said:

It'd be interesting to hear WWII from Finland's perspective. The only good nation aligned with the Axis.

WWII from Finland's perspective was "those bastard Russians attacked us, and we'll accept any help in getting rid of them." Though Britain did bomb Finland at one point, and sunk their merchant shipping, thereby disproving the notion that democracies don't fight each other.

Finland then managed to extricate themselves towards the end of the war once they realised things weren't going so well, and Stalin passed up the opportunity to install a satellite government there afterwards (perhaps memories of 1939 ugliness were still there, but Moscow could have done it had they really wanted, and none of the western countries would have stopped them).

[Horza]

If I recall correctly, the UK and France were actually disturbingly close to all-out war with with the USSR over Finland before Weserubung put the kibosh on their plans. Would have made things very interesting.

[paddington]

Nukelavee, on 21 March 2012 - 08:10 AM, said:

post 24

My Great-grandad was sunk 3 times during WW2, he was a merchant seamen. Although he was sunk 4 times during WW1 where he was in the Norwegien Navy.

[Roose Bolton's Pet Leech]

paddington, on 23 March 2012 - 05:38 AM, said:

My Great-grandad was sunk 3 times during WW2, he was a merchant seamen.

My Granddad was in the same boat (if you'll excuse the pun). Three different ship sinkings during WWII (including the famous Prince of Wales sinking).

[paddington]

Roose Bolton, on 23 March 2012 - 06:20 AM, said:

My Granddad was in the same boat (if you'll excuse the pun). Three different ship sinkings during WWII (including the famous Prince of Wales sinking).

My great uncle was a stoker on the Prince of Wales, I belive he been transferred to subs before the sinking though

[lyvyathan]

Maithanet, on 19 March 2012 - 11:40 AM, said:

I've read a decent amount of WWII history books, but for the most part these all had either American or British authors.  One obvious limitation is that I only read books written in English, but I was nonetheless wondering if anyone had any recommendations of history from the perspective of either Germany or Russia, becuase I imagine they would be pretty different.  Many American history books are happy to minimize the contribution of the Soviets in particular (often devoting entire chapters to relatively unimportant battles like the Bulge and Arnhem, while combining the Stalingrad and Kursk campaigns into a catch-all "The Soviets turn the tide" chapter).

Does anyone have any recommendations that fit the bill?  I'm more looking for books that are pretty large in scope, rather than focusing on one particular battle, since I think that the national perspective is less important when you focus more closely.

There's actually quite a number of German and Japanese translated books now in English.

Manstein has his own biography from his own pov.

Saburo Sakai - a IJN fighter pilot - has his own biography - although some claim that the English translators made stuff up.

Tigers in the Mud - is an account of a German tank commander's view of the Russian front.

:The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War - contains some very good true stories.

I wouldn't be so harsh as to discount the American and British involvement in the war. Its become quite fashionable to say that the Russians did most of the fighting, ergo the history of WW2 should be more about them. But WW2 was more than just Allied vs Axis. It was also about who would control Europe post-war. Churchill was well aware of this fact and hence he supported Market Garden and the push through Italy.

[lyvyathan]

Roose Bolton, on 23 March 2012 - 02:13 AM, said:

WWII from Finland's perspective was "those bastard Russians attacked us, and we'll accept any help in getting rid of them." Though Britain did bomb Finland at one point, and sunk their merchant shipping, thereby disproving the notion that democracies don't fight each other.

Finland then managed to extricate themselves towards the end of the war once they realised things weren't going so well, and Stalin passed up the opportunity to install a satellite government there afterwards (perhaps memories of 1939 ugliness were still there, but Moscow could have done it had they really wanted, and none of the western countries would have stopped them).

Finland is an amazing nation. And to think they managed to pay the indemnity to the Russians as well.

[lyvyathan]

Roose Bolton, on 23 March 2012 - 02:04 AM, said:

The Soviets themselves put lend-lease's contribution at 4%, but I'll happily admit that the US, UK, and assorted Allies war-efforts made life easier for Moscow. I just think that in a straight Germany (and Italy, and under-the-table Spanish) fight versus the Soviets, the latter would have still won, just have taken longer to do it.

Its a huge debatable topic that one. The pro-Soviet pov is to discount the Allied bombing campaign and the impact that the Normandy invasions had (and of course lend-lease, which involved more than just sending arms - but also logistical equipment).

Take for example the impact of the Allied bombing campaign - how many 88mm flak guns did the Germans have to hold back from the Russian front... how many fighter planes were kept back to defend against the bombing raids and not mention the resources spent in repair etc.. for the bombing raids.

Its actually quite ironic that Churchill - the big imperialist - decided to send much needed equipment to Communist Russia in 1941 rather than to the eastern part of the British Empire- ie Malaya/Singapore - whose commanders were at the time worried about the prospect of a Japanese attack.

Edited by lyvyathan, 23 March 2012 - 07:37 AM.

[lyvyathan]

Yoadm, on 21 March 2012 - 11:18 PM, said:

[/left]



Umm, if either the USSR or the US were factored out, the war wouldn't have been won. The USSR blunted the Wermacht, and pushed it back, but this would have hardly been possible without land lease and the diversion of a massive amount of German resources west (Resources more than manpower, before you correct me). From the production of submarines (700 of them), anti-aircraft weapons (80,000 of them), and the destruction of 80% of the luftwaffe in the west (50% of it was directly diverted west). That does not include manpower, troops, tanks, production falls from bombings, etc..

And Land lease represented 14% of the Soviet war effort, but since it focused on fields the Soviets were bad at producing (or mining), it allowed the Soviets to streamline their production, thus representing a far higher direct contribution to the Soviets than 14%. I would not discount this.


Edit: Stalingrad is psycological. Materially, there were far more destructive battles in the eastern front.

Of course it might have helped if Stalin didn't sign the non-aggression pact with Hitler and compound that stupendous feat by helping Germany invade Poland in 1939.

[IheartTesla]

DornishKnight, on 22 March 2012 - 02:02 PM, said:

It'd be interesting to hear WWII from Finland's perspective. The only good nation aligned with the Axis.

Edit: Okay, forgot about the Burmese independent forces.

Well, I don't know what 'good' nation means, but if you include the Burmese independent forces, you should also include the INA (Indian National Army) under Bose. Their numbers were far less than the Indian troops who fought for the Allies though (has to be, since most of the INA were conscripted from PoWs). They also had all female regiments, which I presume was unique at the time and gave the Japanese some fits for sure.

But yeah, one needs to remember that in Asia many good nations chose the Japanese over the Allies because they considered them a lesser evil then Western imperialists. The reality was more complicated of course.

[Assar]

DornishKnight, on 22 March 2012 - 02:02 PM, said:

It'd be interesting to hear WWII from Finland's perspective. The only good nation aligned with the Axis.

Edit: Okay, forgot about the Burmese independent forces.

DornishKnight, on 22 March 2012 - 02:02 PM, said:

It'd be interesting to hear WWII from Finland's perspective. The only good nation aligned with the Axis.

Edit: Okay, forgot about the Burmese independent forces.

Well, Finland was caught between a rock and a hard place in 1941. After the defeat in the winter war 1939-40 the will to get back the territories lost was strong. The options was either to stay neutral and be occupied by Germany or join the Sovjets and became occupied by Germany or join Germany which was steamrolling the rest of Europe.
In hindsight the polticians made the right decision( in my subjective opinion) Like president Ryti promised not to make a peace with the Sovjets in exchange for more weapons and support in 1944 when things where going to hell. Then when the Sovjet shifted their attention after the "fourth strategic offensive" he resigned, and Mannerheim became president and managed to get a peace, which led to war with the germans, but by that time they where spent already.

Forgotten "heroes" would be for example Karl Lennart Oesch, Who led the forces that liberated Viborg in 1941 and caught several sovjet regiments/divisions in the Porraslammi pocket.(mayby the greatest victory during the continuation war) He also was given the command over the army of the isthmus during the sovjet offensive 1944.(according to wikipedia )he commanded 2/3 of the army at that point and yet he never made the rank of general).
He has also written some books which i haven't read.

As a bonus: German newsreel from 1941http://www.youtube.c...eHEpN8XCH4&NR=1

[IheartTesla]

I'm sorry, I forgot this was a book thread, so let me recommend one book,,,,John Toland's Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese empire. it won a Pulitzer prize so it cant be that bad.

Edited by IheartTesla, 23 March 2012 - 02:58 PM.

[Ckrisz]

Finland's War of Choiceis a pretty detailed but excruciatingly dry history of Finland's WWII experience, with lots of diplomatic history as well as military. You get some pretty good vignettes of what actually happened as Finland decided to join up with the Nazis, as well as interesting tidbits about the initial stages of Barbarossa as the Finns joined the Germans in attacking in the north. Learned about how the Soviets resisted quite stoutly in certain sectors, sending SS troops fleeing in disorder on more than one occasion even this early on.

A more obscure German partner, Hungary, is the subject of Kristzian Ungvary's Siege of Budapest, which is one of the better military histories I've read in the past year or so. Ungvary writes from the Hungarian military perspective, so you get very little or no view of the Soviet side of this battle, but it ranks as one of the ugliest, bloodiest urban battles in history - up there with Stalingrad and Berlin in terms of casualties. You get a very good idea of just how massive this battle was, as well as the ragged discipline of both German and Soviet forces by this time in the war, where enormous attrition had already taken place.

Edited by Ckrisz, 23 March 2012 - 02:44 PM.

[Werthead]

I'd take a look at Guderian's Panzer Leader. It's an interesting look at the problems faced by a very efficient and pragmatic miltary commander when your political leader is a stark-raving nutcase. Guderian's total immunity to Hitler's charisma and his repeated tendency to call Hitler on his bullshit to his face is something that is fascinating to read about first-hand, though Guderian does rather tend to over-inflate his own contributions to blitzkrieg doctrine and, as usual with any Wehrmacht commander of WWII, his attempts to distance himself from the Holocaust is rather unconvincing. Still, an interesting read.

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And Land lease represented 14% of the Soviet war effort, but since it focused on fields the Soviets were bad at producing (or mining), it allowed the Soviets to streamline their production, thus representing a far higher direct contribution to the Soviets than 14%. I would not discount this.

There has been a - rather disturbing - trend in recent American narratives to suggest that American Lend Lease was vital to the Russian war effort and without it the USSR would have been defeated.

This is, to put it mildly, bollocks.

Lend Lease did not start arriving in Russian ports in significant numbers until the summer of 1942, well past the point at which absolute crisis (at Moscow in the winter of 1941) had been averted. From that point forwards, a Russian victory was inevitable. Lend Lease played a significant role in speeding up the rate of Russian advance (particularly the addition of American jeeps and troop-carrying trucks), but it did not make that advance possible in the first place. That was already underway.

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It'd be interesting to hear WWII from Finland's perspective. The only good nation aligned with the Axis.

Finland's war with Russia caused tremendous headaches in London and Paris. Britain and France felt naturally inclined to ally with Finland against Russia, but were unhappy with Finland's German connections. Nevertheless, briefly in 1940 Britain and France came perilously close to declaring war on the USSR at the same time they were already at war with Germany (this is known as the 'jumping into a fire whilst wearing an outfit doused in petrol' syndrome). The only reason they didn't is that the USSR basically overwhelmed Finland with weight of numbers before that point developed. British and Finnish forces did later exchange fire in several engagements, but overall Finland stayed out of situations that would have brought into direct conflict with the Western Allies.

Quote

Its a huge debatable topic that one. The pro-Soviet pov is to discount the Allied bombing campaign and the impact that the Normandy invasions had (and of course lend-lease, which involved more than just sending arms - but also logistical equipment).

Take for example the impact of the Allied bombing campaign - how many 88mm flak guns did the Germans have to hold back from the Russian front... how many fighter planes were kept back to defend against the bombing raids and not mention the resources spent in repair etc.. for the bombing raids.

The truth is that Germany, whether against the Allies or the Russians, massively under-performed in WWII. It didn't reach maximum industrial output until 1944, by which point it had been under day-and-night, round-the-clock bombing by Allied forces for more than two years. If it had reached that point of output in 1940 or 1941, things could have been very different.

Also, the German approach to dealing with hardware problems versus the Russian approach is almost beyond farcical. In 1941 the Germans realised their tanks were inept against the Russian T-34s, so had to come up with a solution. This is what they came up with:

1) Design two brand new tanks, one to counter the T-34 (the Panther) and one to utterly outclass it (the Tiger).
2) Fuck around for two years straight trying to get them to work.
3) Deploy them to the battlefield at Kursk only to see both suffer massive mechanical problems.
4) Spend another year to a year and a half fixing those problems.
5) Finally deploy both tanks in decent numbers at a reasonable rate of mechanical reliability, just in time to face the biggest seaborne invasion in human history (Overlord) and the biggest ground offensives in human history (Bagration/Berlin) and then have the factories making both tanks be flatted by aerial bombardment.

OTOH, the Russian counter-technological movement was rather more efficient:

1) Strap a slightly bigger gun to the T-34 and still kick the shit out of everything the Germans throw at you (including having an upgunned T-34 detachment take out seven King Tigers on the latter's first-ever deployment in the field).

Looking at German histories of the war, one concludes that the vast death and destruction caused by the Germans was done with them having the equivalent of one hand tied behind their backs at almost all times. If the Germans had unleashed their full military and industrial potential in 1940-41, Russia would likely have fallen and the outcome of the war would have been very different.

[Yoadm]

Werthead, on 24 March 2012 - 09:04 PM, said:

There has been a - rather disturbing - trend in recent American narratives to suggest that American Lend Lease was vital to the Russian war effort and without it the USSR would have been defeated.

This is, to put it mildly, bollocks.

Lend Lease did not start arriving in Russian ports in significant numbers until the summer of 1942, well past the point at which absolute crisis (at Moscow in the winter of 1941) had been averted. From that point forwards, a Russian victory was inevitable. Lend Lease played a significant role in speeding up the rate of Russian advance (particularly the addition of American jeeps and troop-carrying trucks), but it did not make that advance possible in the first place. That was already underway.

Hardly. It was not significant untill precisely the period where Russia started pushing back. Precisely at the period where the Russian industry was gearing back up and could focus on specific hardware it was good at producing, while discarding what it could get from the west. Much of the efficiency of the Russian industry was due to that fact. Furthermore, one of the main factors contributing to the Russian push was the hundreds of thousands of trucks, jeeps, and Train equipment supplied by the west. Not only did it allow the Logistical push itself, but it allowed the quick movement of Russian forces north/south, enabling them to attack unexpected weakspots in the German defence line, enabling penetration, exploitation, and push to the German rear, which is what caused the catastrophic German defeats post Kursk. This is something that any number of Soviet forces could not do if they did not have the logistics to do it. No land lease, and you probably have a very bloody stalemate in the eastern front.

Edited by Yoadm, 24 March 2012 - 11:35 PM.

[Antonius Pius]

lyvyathan, on 23 March 2012 - 07:19 AM, said:

Manstein has his own biography from his own pov.

There's also Mungo Melvin's biopgraphy of Manstein, which is less concerned to paint him the hero.

Guderian's Panzer Leader is also quite interesting, as Wert mentioned.

[Horza]

I prefer Boo Hoo Hoo It Was All Hitler's Fault: An Anthology of Wehrmacht Memoirs and it's companion Generalplan Ost? Never Heard of It!

[Antonius Pius]

Horza, on 01 April 2012 - 02:11 AM, said:

I prefer Boo Hoo Hoo It Was All Hitler's Fault: An Anthology of Wehrmacht Memoirs and it's companion Generalplan Ost? Never Heard of It!

Oddly enough, What Shall We Do With The Boo-Hoo Baby is the only title close to Boo Hoo Hoo Amazon has. Fortunately, it's available in both English and Arabic and in Portugese and English.