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US Politics: Passing Gas In Public is Abhorrent Behavior


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1 hour ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

How were we supposed to have controlled the Soviets? Outside of declaring war on them, which would've been a disaster of epic proportions.

 

36 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

The Soviets broke the back of Nazi Germany. They bore the brunt of Nazi atrocities even more so than the Jews did. They were clearly not interested in diplomacy at the end of the war. They were going to extract their pound of flesh from their half of Germany and any of the other Eastern European countries that joined with Nazi Germany and they didn't give a flying fuck as to what the West had to say about it.. Furthermore, the West was in no position to force such diplomacy. At the time Berlin fell to the Soviets, they were the foremost military power on the continent. Believe me, we didn't want any piece of that bad action. Really, the Nazi prosecution of the war on the Eastern Front made any such diplomacy a pipedream.

Um, The Allies handling of the fallout of WW1 basically guaranteed WWII. The diplomacy there was truly horrific. I'm not trying to say WWII was awesome in any sense, but the statescraft behind the recovery was damn near brilliant. I don't think you could've asked for a better political handling of the post war situation than was provided by the West.

 

9 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Eh, without Nazi Germany as a buffer, they were almost certainly going to end up as an enemy. Right off the bat you had East Germans sneaking over into West Germany. You had a Soviet occupation that was much harsher than its' Western counterpart (and for really understandable reasons, if you study the Eastern Front) You had two ideologies that couldn't be further apart politically, and the Soviets controlled a huge chunk of Europe. I can't really envision the circumstance where they don't become our ideological enemy.

The Soviets were at the end of their strength by the time they raped Berlin. I would have agreed with Patton and kept the armies moving East. Hell, after dropping the bombs on Japan just keep the Pacific forces heading West through Siberia.

I know it's an unpopular position to hold, but Russia should not be a country.

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1 minute ago, WinterFox said:

 

 

The Soviets were at the end of their strength by the time they raped Berlin. I would have agreed with Patton and kept the armies moving East. Hell, after dropping the bombs on Japan just keep the Pacific forces heading West through Siberia.

I know it's an unpopular position to hold, but Russia should not be a country.

A lot of historians would disagree with you. They were at their height as far as production went. They were out manufacturing the U.S. with the added bonus of having the production occur on the continent. Their tanks were vastly superior to their western counterparts at this point. Their troops were refined in Nazi fire. Their commanders had learned at the feet of Nazi generals who had written the book on Blitzkrieg. They had been dealing with what was initially a vastly superior Nazi army since 1940. Patton didn't have nearly the experience that the Soviet commanders had at this point. I think they very likely would've slapped us silly in 1945. I suppose the one advantage you could point to was the Atomic one, but do you really think we had the will (or compelling enough reason) to go that route?

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Just now, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

A lot of historians would disagree with you. They were at their height as far as production went. They were out manufacturing the U.S. with the added bonus of having the production occur on the continent. Their tanks were vastly superior to their western counterparts at this point. Their troops were refined in Nazi fire. Their commanders had learned at the feet of Nazi generals who had written the book on Blitzkrieg. They had been dealing with what was initially a vastly superior Nazi army since 1940. Patton didn't have nearly the experience that the Soviet commanders had at this point. I think they very likely would've slapped us silly in 1945. I suppose the one advantage you could point to was the Atomic one, but do you really think we had the will (or compelling enough reason) to go that route?

In hindsight? Yes.

I was speaking more to their manpower though. They had something like 4 million in the field, but there were no real reserves left. Sure Stalin would have thrown every Soviet who could walk into the meat grinder but the Nazis had dealt such huge damages to the Red army that it could not have kept functioning through another campaign against a relatively unbloodied world power. After Japan surrendered I think they would have crumbled from a Siberian invasion. And I'm not saying that we should have literally kept driving through Germany without ever stopping, but I would have advised immediately putting together operations and recruitment for a Russian campaign to begin when Japan had capitulated.

And if they can survive that onslaught so what? They're not crossing the Atlantic or the Pacific. They could barely muster the logistical capacity to cross Poland, the Red Army had been going for years on momentum alone. All those tanks and guns aren't going to save them when they're operated by octogenarians and Moscow is a pile of radioactive rubble.

Again, I know that's a horrible position to hold but there it is.

 

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12 minutes ago, WinterFox said:

 

 

The Soviets were at the end of their strength by the time they raped Berlin. I would have agreed with Patton and kept the armies moving East. Hell, after dropping the bombs on Japan just keep the Pacific forces heading West through Siberia.

I know it's an unpopular position to hold, but Russia should not be a country.

Patton shouldn't be anywhere near a policy-making table as pretty much everyone who ever worked with him would attest.

In terms of conventional land forces the Allies would have been in big trouble and it almost certainly would have come down to the bomb. This was the assessment of the allied high command at the time, too...and one of the reasons they were so enthusiastic about Hiroshima/Nagasaki was as a demonstration to the soviets that their conventional (land, mind) superiority wasn't necessarily the trump card should that be a temptation. We now know from internal communications that the Soviets weren't really contemplating any such thing before the A-bombs were dropped and in fact the reverse was true; they began to see the US as a nuclear maverick without normal restraints, and that added to the growing mistrust. But 'end of their strength' isn't accurate, though they had certainly paid the lion's share of the war's human cost.

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8 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

Patton shouldn't be anywhere near a policy-making table as pretty much everyone who ever worked with him would attest.

In terms of conventional land forces the Allies would have been in big trouble and it almost certainly would have come down to the bomb. This was the assessment of the allied high command at the time, too...and one of the reasons they were so enthusiastic about Hiroshima/Nagasaki was as a demonstration to the soviets that their conventional (land, mind) superiority wasn't necessarily the trump card should that be a temptation. We now know from internal communications that the Soviets weren't really contemplating any such thing before the A-bombs were dropped and in fact the reverse was true; they began to see the US as a nuclear maverick without normal restraints, and that added to the growing mistrust. But 'end of their strength' isn't accurate, though they had certainly paid the lion's share of the war's human cost.

30 million casualties over 6 years for a population of """""""180""""""" million? I may be overstating the impact of their losses, but with the bomb I think it would have been a successful campaign for Allied forces.

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27 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

A lot of historians would disagree with you. They were at their height as far as production went. They were out manufacturing the U.S. with the added bonus of having the production occur on the continent. Their tanks were vastly superior to their western counterparts at this point. Their troops were refined in Nazi fire. Their commanders had learned at the feet of Nazi generals who had written the book on Blitzkrieg. They had been dealing with what was initially a vastly superior Nazi army since 1940. Patton didn't have nearly the experience that the Soviet commanders had at this point. I think they very likely would've slapped us silly in 1945. I suppose the one advantage you could point to was the Atomic one, but do you really think we had the will (or compelling enough reason) to go that route?

I'll agree with your overall point that the Soviets would have won, but their manufacturing was nowhere near America's,their food production had cratered, they were at the end of their manpower reserves, and still dependent on the Allies for many natural resources and things like trucks and trains. That, and the Sherman outperformed the Soviet Tanks in Korea.

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8 minutes ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

I'll agree with your overall point that the Soviets would have won, but their manufacturing was nowhere near America's,their food production had cratered, they were at the end of their manpower reserves, and still dependent on the Allies for many natural resources and things like trucks and trains. That, and the Sherman outperformed the Soviet Tanks in Korea.

I was under the impression that their tank and plane manufacturing was way ahead of America's at this time. I suppose I could be mistaken. The Sherman tank was only superior to any other medium tank in that it was typically deployed with numerical superiority, no? To the best of my understanding the T-34 for example or the German Panther were far superior by almost any metric. 

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4 minutes ago, WinterFox said:

 

30 million casualties over 6 years for a population of """""""180""""""" million? I may be overstating the impact of their losses, but with the bomb I think it would have been a successful campaign for Allied forces.

I'm not arguing that their losses weren't horrific, but more where things were by the end of the war. The Soviets had already endured the bull of those losses before/as they turned the tide at Stalingrad/Kursk and once their shifted industrial base started to kick in and their utilitarian military innovations took hold and the Western Front opened up and took some of the German attention they were pretty much riding downhill. Everyone was exhausted by the end, but they were, by the context of the prior several years, battle hardened and deadly. 

The bomb issue is itself complicated. First, no air superiority, and the Soviet air advances were as significant as those on land; at sea was where they were totally outclassed, but the bomb wasn't deliverable at sea and they were about as unrelliant on sea power as a power could be, so...in the short term...negligible. So, delivering the bomb's a big issue, and remember that there's no way the US sends in nukes w/o air superiority, as the consequences of it being shot down/recovered were incalculable. Like First Punic War captured trireme level.

Secondly, there just weren't that many of the things, and the Soviets had shown at willingness to absorb inhuman levels of destruction already. So a strike at St. Pete's and say Vladivostok probably doesn't accomplish anything definitive. 

Third, the US...and much more so their allies...were also pretty exhausted.  Selling the public on a war of aggression against your very recent ally is not going to go smoothly. Remember this is before decades of demonizing communism were the norm, and there was no Pearl Harbour to point to. Even if you accept your premise that Russia shouldn't be, there was no way people in general would have foreseen that at the time, and asking them to bleed a lot more to accomplish it would strike many as insane. There's a reason Churchill went from superstar to voted out pretty quickly.

 

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in addition to all that, the anti-communism American politicians that were ascendent in the late forties (culminating in the HoR flip in 48) were all part of the pro-Nazi cabal of American politicians who fought tooth and nail to keep us out of their fuhrer's war. They were at their nadir of influence in 44 and 45. 

so foreign policy flipping from anti-nazi to anti-communism to prosecute a war extension against an ally wasn't very likely, given the politicians necessary to execute the flip either weren't in power or were not in the mindset that an ally was actually an enemy.

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47 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

I was under the impression that their tank and plane manufacturing was way ahead of America's at this time. I suppose I could be mistaken. The Sherman tank was only superior to any other medium tank in that it was typically deployed with numerical superiority, no? To the best of my understanding the T-34 for example or the German Panther were far superior by almost any metric. 

Regarding production:

For land:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Land_forces

You'll see that Soviet tank and AFV production outpaces  by about 4,000 out of a 100,000, but add in the British and the Anglos have a pretty decent advantage.

Though the Western Allies needed fewer tanks than Soviets did. For one thing, they lost a lot less, for another, they had many fewer men (one of the reasons I say the Soviets would have won, actually). The US actually limited the number of division it drafted so as to keep military production up. You'll see here that American production actually peaked in 1943 and tapers pretty heavily after than. Soviet production also tapered, but to a lesser degree and peaked in 1944.

Second, look at a different number: other vehicles, where the USA outproduces the USSR 2.3 million to 197 thousand. This would be trucks and jeeps and stuff. The American Army had enough of these to motorize every division. Every American GI could be driven to the battle and had his supplies delivered by truck while Soviet troops, like German troops had to walk to battle and have supplies delivered by horse drawn carriage. The Soviets were better off in this respect than the Nazis, though, in large part due to Lend Lease.

In terms of Air Forces, the US outproduced the Soviets 326,000 to 124,000. And that doesn't even account for the British.

 

As for the Sherman, it was by far the best tank in the war in terms of 'soft' features. It was the most reliable (so that it could actually get to the battle), had the best optics (so that the crew actually see the targets first and aim well), and ergonomics/internal layout (so that, for example the loader could load a shell without hitting the gunner in the head), and even had primitive gun stabilizer.

The original T-34, by contrast, had terrible ergonomics. the turret was crowded and didn't have a basket so the the guys in it didn't automatically rotate with the turret. The Commander had to be the loader and radio operator (assuming he even had a radio) and didn't have an easy way to look out. It was also unreliable, but this might have been an intentional effort to save production costs (Soviet Planners assumed that they'd be dying fairly quickly anyway). The T-34/85 solved some, but not all the issues.

The Panther was horribly unreliable, basically blew out it's transmission every time you looked at it funny. It's gun was good for killing tanks, but not so great for killing infantry. It's frontal armor was amazing, but it's side armor could be penetrated by a 13mm anti-materiel rifle.

Also, comparing just hard stats, the Sherman had about equivalent armor to the T-34. The T-34 had 47 mm sloped at 60 degrees in the front while the Sherman had 50mm at 47 degrees. The T-34 had slightly better side armor, and the Sherman had better turret armor. They had similar guns, and their upgrades had similar guns. I think the T-34 has a much better reputation because it originally debuted in 1941 against PZ Is', II's, III's, and IV's, while the Sherman debuted in 1944 against Tigers and Panthers. The Sherman, like I mentioned above, was a lot better in some way than those tanks, but since it's armor and gun weren't as good, it would have colored a lot of crewmen impressions.

 

Sorry for my nerding out, Kal. To get back on topic, how about that Trump, guy, huh? 

 

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3 minutes ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

Sorry for my nerding out, Kal. To get back on topic, how about that Trump, guy, huh? 

I thank you for nerding out. I knew the Soviets relied heavily on lend/lease for our jeeps and trucks, but the rest of what you wrote was news to me. Good info on the Sherman to T-34 comparisons. Thanks WWTR!

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Today I heard on the radio listening to the Marketplace show that Trump met with a bunch of CEO's and declared two things, first since he's been Prez he's 'created 650,000 jobs', and a sentence or two later 'about 600,000' jobs.  The host of the show then mentioned that in the two months the actual number has been around 350,000 jobs and wondered where the Prez got his facts.

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Something else I heard today that is kind of terrifying.

Putin went on earlier and claimed that it was provocateurs who were planting the gas, and they are planning on attacks in places like southern Damascus. Of course they'll be framing Assad of doing it so that they can get the US into war.

I can absolutely see Russia actually encouraging something like this happening to indicate how Assad didn't 'do' anything. The US intel will almost certainly not be fooled, but it won't matter - there will be enough confusion and doubt sowed that it'll make everything murky, all at the cost of only a few hundred chemical deaths. 

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2 hours ago, WinterFox said:

 

 

The Soviets were at the end of their strength by the time they raped Berlin. I would have agreed with Patton and kept the armies moving East. Hell, after dropping the bombs on Japan just keep the Pacific forces heading West through Siberia.

I know it's an unpopular position to hold, but Russia should not be a country.

Russia has as much right to exist as any nation-state.  I don't want it bullying its neighbors but that doesn't mean I want it to cease to exist.

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Also, on that note apparently the Trump administration is struggling to put on the Easter Egg Roll

Quote

 

For starters, the kids don't know what's going on:

Washington-area public schools that normally receive blocks of tickets for as many as 4,000 children have yet to hear from the White House, according to representatives for school systems in the District of Columbia; Arlington, Va.; and Alexandria, Va. Several groups representing military families, who have accounted for as many as 3,000 guests in recent years, also said they had yet to be contacted.

Legislators are in the dark:

Members of Congress have not received word from the White House about whether they will get tickets to distribute to their constituents. One aide to a Republican lawmaker said White House officials “seem to be a bit behind schedule.”

And until very recently, not even the poor Sesame Street characters knew whether their services would be required:

“We just got word about this year’s Egg Roll and are working on planning,” Jennifer Rankin Byrne, the senior director of media relations for PBS, said on March 20. The Easter Egg Roll has been crowded in past years with cast members from Sesame Street, but this year, there will be a lone emissary.

A representative for PBS declined to mention which character would be in attendance, but we can only hope it ends up being Oscar the Grouch.

 

 

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