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Post by chequeredflaggg on Feb 3, 2013 11:16:44 GMT 10
must have been really fucking something to go through, for members of either side.
Hard to even imagine, isnt it.
Both European civilisations, with a lot of culture...not some islamo rockapes and potato-sacks fighting over fucken Syria or Libya.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 3, 2013 11:31:54 GMT 10
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Post by bender on Feb 3, 2013 14:00:22 GMT 10
Buzz, you're making some very silly claims about both Stalingrad and the 2nd World War in general. I can sense a bit of a trend developing so I'd just give you some friendly advice to not get too carried away with your analysis of what meant what.
If you'd like to understand the battle both in it's stratgic sense and implications, and to learn what it was like in microcosim I can't give you any better advice then to read Antony Beevor's Stalingrad. It won Russian historical literacy awards in addition to British and other international acclaim which is pretty good going for a former Lt Colonel of the British Army.
To put your claims into context. One thing won the war which was industrial output. There were a whole host of co-stars, poor german intelligence (mainly on the subject of Soviet Aircraft and Tank production), a Soviet tank which apart from being superior to just about everything else at the time was also ideally suited to operations in snow, Hitler's lunacy and self delusion which reached it's high tide during the course of the battle, the steadfastness and willingness for self sacrifice on the part of the Soviet people, poor moral on the part of Germany's allies on the Volga front, American Lend Lease and the staunch ruthlessness of Stalin who held the Government and the people together at a time when only someone with that degree of sociopathic ruthlessness could have done so.
The stories of incidents like Pavlov's house (which Chuikov the stalingrad defence commander liked to boast cost the germans more lives in their 6 week long attempt to capture it then their entire conquest of France) of the tank crews drving freshly built, unpainted and even lacking gunsights, T-34 tanks out of the Red October Tractor Plant and straight into battle, the snipers from both sides who didn't bother with shooting officers, instead aiming their rifles at the children who both sides used for jobs like filling water bottles are endless.
But at the end of the day Buzz, military production in the factories dismantled in Moscow and Leningrad and moved to the Ural Mountains won the battle, just as economic output and its resultant effect on military production won the war in both Europe and Asia.
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Post by bender on Feb 3, 2013 21:31:29 GMT 10
Stalingrad is never mentioned in the west?
Individual countries do tend to focus on the campaigns that their armed forces were involved in, hence the fact that D Day is not celebrated in Australia to the same degree that it is in England or the USA.
The world closely followed the battle of Stalingrad Buzzo, it was front page news in the USA, Australia and the other countries of the commonwealth becausse of the strategic importance of the battle, (the great fear being that Stalin would accept a negotiated peace with the Germans and thus release the bulk of the German forces back onto the continent).
When Georgie Zhukov (the commander of forces of operation uranus and the man who gave the final go ahead to the mission) toured the US after the war he was feted in such a way as to leave no doubt that the American people considered him a great hero, indeed, Eisenhower accompanied him on most of the tour and publicly lauded him as the man who played one of the largest parts in winning the war.
If you look at the world through the historical perspective of the cold war Buzzo it's fairly easy to understand that the western world wasn't going to be talking up the Soviets achievements in the war once they started squabbling with the Soviets over the fate of Eastern Europe.
Even in the Soviet Union (which rightly held their achievements in a great deal of pride) once Stalin had been denounced there was a fairly comprehensive revision of the actions of the Great Patriotic War to now list the mistakes made by (or at least now atttributed to Stalin) where before every mistake was really just a cunning ploy.
You've repeatedly made the assertion that had the Germans armed the Ukrainians they would have won the war. That is utterly ridiculous and is simply not backed up by the facts. Firstly, there were a great number of Ukrainians and other people who had originally belonged to the Soviet Army who changed sides during the war (mainly as a consequence of being taken POW and given a choice between putting on a German uniform or starving) these people were known collectively as Hiwi's and at one point there were tens upon tens of thousands of them serving in the German Army on the Eastern Front, (many more were sent West to man the Atlantic wall where they played a significant part in the D Day landings in many instances by shooting their German Officer as soon as they spotted the invasion fleet approaching, disabling their weapons and waiting for the Allies to come up and take them prisoner).
It would obviously be a surprise to you Buzzo that the Ukranian contribution to the Soviet side in the war was massive. I believe that it was one of the Ukranian armies that led the way back to Berlin. There was a great deal of ill feeling in the Ukraine towards the Russians for actions before the war, and in larger part for the scorched earth policy that the Soviet Army instigated as they withdrew back across the Ukraine in the face of the German blitzkrieg. But similarly, the execution of a fair part of the Ukranian populace at the hands of the invading German Army would rule out the Germans ever considering the Ukraine as anything but an ideal place to create farms once they'd taken care of the little problem that there were people already living there. Indeed the German feeling towards Ukrainians can be summed up by a message sent by a divisional commander to Paulus as it became apparent that the Russians were closing in on the Germans and the Volga front was pretty much kaput.
The message read "What should I do with my Hiwi's? Kill them?"
My complaint with your pronouncements in this thread Buzz is that you latch on to a couple of facts in isolation and they become your everything to the exclusion of everything else.
If you want to know the one mistake that the Germans made that cost them the war, I think most credible historians are in agreement that it was the fact that Germany never placed its economy on a war footing, you can probably go a little deeper and say that their failure to make any preperations whatsoever for a protracted war on the Eastern front (Hitler believed that the war would be concluded even faster then their conquest of France and as such no one in the German High Command was game to suggest that it might be a good idea to make preperations for a long stay) was a decisive factor in the loss of all three of the invading German Armies (Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad).
Lastly, your assertion that D Day was a walk in the park apart from Omaha Beach shows that your understanding of the war in general comes from the movie Saving Private Ryan and other largely fictional sources.
The Allies and their Military leaders certainly didn't consider D Day to be anything but a highly risky, incredibly hazardous option. Eisenhower believed that there was a good chance it would fail, and at about 2 hours into the landing there was a meeting held to decide whether to suspend the landings. To blithely gloss over that (and the weeks of bitter fighting that lay ahead for the soldiers who had landed on the beaches on June 6 does a great disservice to them and in many cases their sacrifice. Things went the Allies way for some reaso, Hitlers staff was too scared to wake him and as such the armoured divisions who had the tasking to wipe the allies off the beach weren't relased, Rommel was off on leave as was a high proportion of German commanders who had gone to Paris for a staff conference.
Once again it will probably be a suprise to you Buzz that if you look at every major action in the Western Theatre as the Allies pushed towards Berlin the Germans were inflicting a massive amount of casualties on them for a relatively minor loss on their part. They were trading space for lives and time in the desperate hope that peace might break out.
The fact that the end toll of D Day concentrated upon the death toll of men on ohama beach is responsible in part for this mythologfy that it was all a walk in the park if you landed anywhere else.
Each and every man who went ashore in the first waves (regardless of their intended landing point went ahead knowing that their odds were not very good. Yet they went ahead anyway.
That should llustrate to you the amount of courage that those mn held.
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Post by chequeredflaggg on Feb 5, 2013 3:31:18 GMT 10
What bothers me is that Stalingrad is never mentioned in the West when the Soviets did everyone a big favour. They were brave and did their duty. We make a big fuss of D-Day but that was stuff all by comparison, except for Omaha Beach it was a walk in the park generally speaking. Youre right that the human scale of most battles in the west were chump-change vs Stalingrad, Buzzock, but not that everything in the West was a 'walk in the park", the battle of the Bocage, Caen, Heurtgen Forest and the entire Italian Campaign were all bloody shambles.. and certainly not that Stalingrad does not continually comes up in conversation in the West, Stalingrad is a brand-name and icon IN THE WEST. Remember the loony-lefties and Kerry fuckwit OBrien telling us that Baghdad was going to be fucking Stalingrad??? There have been that many Guido Knopp documentaries on channel Adolf SBS about fucken Eastern Front and Stalingrad, Ive stopped couting.
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Post by garfield on Feb 5, 2013 22:08:10 GMT 10
Matters not if the krauts walked all over Russia they still would have lost the war anyway cos the yanks would have ended up nuking the c***s.
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Post by chequeredflaggg on Feb 5, 2013 22:22:28 GMT 10
I am familiar with the Bocage, and Caen. The Poles fought there like Japanese fanatics, and I have Polish relatives. Stalingrad broke the back of the Nazis - that is my point. 500,000 Nazi soldiers lost at Stalingrad and another 1,000.000 lost in the retreat from Moscow. Had the Nazis A armed the Ukranians and B not split their army, there would not have been a Nazi loss at Stalingrad. the loss of Paulus 6th Army was a heavy one, but not quite 500k men, about half of that KIA or POW... still obviously by far the most significant blow to the AXIS at that time.. You can talk the 'what ifs" of the eastern Front till the cows come home, he continues to Moscow, he doesnt lose weeks in 1941 diverting to Greece/Crete or possibly not even to North Africa, despite all being German victories initially, he treats the Anti-Stalin Russians whether Ukrainian or other better and recruits as many of them as possible ...if they werent VolksDeutsch as some of the Poles and Czechs were, he was going to eliminate or enslave them as well eventually anyway. the trouble with conquering Russia would always still be wtf to then actually do with it, their vague vision was some kind of Old Plantation south with a few docile slavs in place of N-ers and themselves in place of the White slaveholders.
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Post by bender on Feb 5, 2013 22:29:30 GMT 10
I am familiar with the Bocage, and Caen. The Poles fought there like Japanese fanatics, and I have Polish relatives. Stalingrad broke the back of the Nazis - that is my point. 500,000 Nazi soldiers lost at Stalingrad and another 1,000.000 lost in the retreat from Moscow. Had the Nazis A armed the Ukranians and B not split their army, there would not have been a Nazi loss at Stalingrad. You've really got to laugh. Buzz is unaware that the battle of stalingrad even occured, then upon learning of it pronounces that the Nazi's would have won if they'd ollowed his advice. Stalingrad didn't break the back of the Nazi's, Hitler wasa lunatic who thought that his wishes could become reality simply by giving the order. Buzz, what we know was what happened, nothing else, it's really the height of foolishness to make claims as you have here.
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Post by chequeredflaggg on Feb 5, 2013 22:41:33 GMT 10
Buzzock is a- Burma /forgotten Army- specialist.
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Post by chequeredflaggg on Feb 6, 2013 6:56:54 GMT 10
Anywhere from 25,000 to 40,000 Soviet civilians died in Stalingrad
and this example, and such as the death toll in the Warsaw Uprisings, are why I ridicule the Lefties bleating about a mere ----1400--- claimed Palestinian deaths ( of all kinds) in 2 week plus operations in Gaza.
It is actually of course evidence of the opposite of what the Leftys say, it suggests extreme preciousness by the IDF to avoid so-called 'civilian" Hamas casualties.
If it was the SS Waffen going on to put down an uprising in Gaza, there would be 10000+ of them dead the first day.
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Post by chequeredflaggg on Feb 6, 2013 7:06:23 GMT 10
Im not sure if the Columbia academic writing this has some kind of political axe to fucken grind, I suspect one, but you may find his piece interesting anyway. I dont believe that there was quite that number of Germans lost at Stalingrad, it is not the number I have always heard repeated till now...it is about a quarter of a million as I have always had it. www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/Stalingrad.htm
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Post by bender on Feb 6, 2013 7:21:48 GMT 10
This is actually an interesting example of what occurs when you get an idea into your mind Buzz. It becomes to you a great beacon, outshining all else and in effect making any other idea invisible to you.
You've claimed about half a dozen times that the fact that the Germans didn't arm the Ukranians was one of two deciding factors in their loss, and further all they had to do was simply arm the Ukranians and they would have been well on the way to winning the war.
In your eagerness to trumpet this claim Buzz you are ignoring quite a few salient points.
The Germans were exterminating the civilian population of the Ukraine because a) they were considered "sub-human" and b) because Germany wanted the land and when you take someone elses land without "removing" the people who live on it they generally keep agitating for its return.
Given those two very deliberate policies (there were even special regiments who moved behind the front line troops to carry out the mass executions) I can't see the Germans suddenly deciding to stand up a surrogate Army amongst the Ukranian population (in the German rear areas and amongst their supply lines and communication lines no less).
You may as well keep repeating that if the Nazi's had had a flux capacitor hooked up to a Delorean they could have travelled back in time and won the war.
Secondly, the Ukranian's were fighting for the Soviet Union, there weren't any military age males remaining in the Ukraine so perhaps you can explain where this imaginary force of hundreds of thousands of men were going to come from.
Thirdly, the Germans were having an incredibly tough time simply keeping themselves (along with their Axis Partners) supplied in Stalingrad. Now I realise that in your mind suppling another half millon or so men is no great problem but in the real world when you can't adequately supply the men you have, adding another half million men to the dinner roll creates much larger problems.
Buzz you've read a book, there are hundreds if not thousands of books written on the topic of the battle of Stalingrad. Don't you think you're being a bit silly in insisting that simply because a theory is in a book then it must be true, particularly when that theory seems to ignore the realities of the situation.
3 days you'd never heard of the battle of stalingrad Buzz, today you're putting yourself up as an expert military theorist.
Pull your head in and stop wasting peoples time with your foolishness.
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Post by garfield on Feb 6, 2013 12:22:38 GMT 10
commies versus nazis, how do you pick a side in that fight?, be like asking wether you wanted rudd or gillard, doesn't matter, you know that either way the countries f***ed!
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Post by bender on Feb 6, 2013 16:42:59 GMT 10
bender, I have several books on the subject of WWII and they go into great detail about Stalingrad. You can say what you like, and the points you make are valid. My points being that the Ukrainians have long been anti Russian, and the Nazis could have used that, come straight out of one of my books on the subject. The Ukranians saw the Nazis as liberators at first, and were willing to fight against the Russians. The splitting of the Nazis and sending half to Baku weakened the force and had they not done that the result could have been very different. My main point was however that Stalingrad was a decisive battle, and a catastrophe from which the Nazis never recovered. After Stalingrad there could only be defeat for the Nazis. Now you are a particularly nasty bastard - we all know this. Again all I know is what is written in my books (plural) on the subject. Yet you turn that into a personal attack. Well I suggest you do the board a big favour and leave. Buzz you stated on this very thread that you'd not heard of Stalingrad before. Now you're claiming to have read several books on the subject? You claimed back at the start of this thread that the German defeat was caused by General Winter and that allowed the Russians to destroy the German's piecemeal. That as an explanation of what happened is so far from the truth that it's not funny. The Soviet warplan was an encirclement of the Germans (which they accomplished) followed by a period in which they consolidated their position before moving in for the kill (which once again they accomplished fairly easily) It's fairly clear Buzz that if you are getting your information from some books, they aren't books about the battle of stalingrad. Germany had lost the war on the day they declared war on the USA. Stalingrad was a very important battle in a symbolic sense (strategically it was not terribly important apart from the fear that the Soviets might accept a seperate peace with Germany) the entire world watched it through Newspaper and Radio reports and there was pretty much Worldwide jubilation when news of the encirclement. Do you want to know the turning point, or highwater mark (or whatever you want to call it) Buzz? And this one should embarrass you a little for it was the Germans facing Australians and other Commonwealth Allies at Toobruk and their loss there that set in train the long fighting withdrawl that ended a few years later in Berlin. Australian forces have the distinction of being present at the first major reversals of both the German and Japanese Army's in WW2. I stated my criticism of your argument fairly clearly Buzz, you get enamoured with a solitary point and repeat it ad nauseum. Now you could take that as a personal attack, and indeed you will, because you instinctively reject any and all criticism of your beliefs, but a smarter person would look upon it as a criticism of your argument style and work to improve themselves.
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Post by garfield on Feb 6, 2013 21:52:47 GMT 10
90-year-old Russian WWII veteran tells of horrors and heroics during the Battle of Stalingrad
MOSCOW – The Soviet soldiers used their own bodies as shields, covering women and children escaping on ferry boats from a Nazi bombardment that killed 40,000 civilians in a single day. It was the height of the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest conflicts of World War II. "They were all hit in the back," said 90-year-old Alexei Stefanov. "But they did not flee." Stefanov is among the few surviving veterans of the battle, which claimed 2 million lives and raged for nearly 200 days before the Red Army turned back the Nazi forces, decisively changing the course of the war. Russia celebrates the 70th anniversary of that victory on Saturday, with President Vladimir Putin taking part in ceremonies in Volgograd, the current name of the city in southern Russia that stretches along the western bank of the Volga River. Stefanov arrived in Stalingrad in August, 1942, just a month after the Nazis began their onslaught. A marine, he commanded what was left of a reconnaissance platoon, 17 scouts who had survived previous missions on the front lines. The German army invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, and by the following summer had pushed deep inside the country. For Adolf Hitler, taking the city named after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin would be a symbolic victory, and it also would allow the Germans to cross the Volga and secure access to Russian oil supplies. What Stefanov saw was a once-thriving industrial city being reduced to rubble by shelling and bombing by the Nazis and their Romanian, Italian, Hungarian and Spanish allies. Only about 100,000 residents had been evacuated, and the remaining civilians were frantically helping to dig trenches. The Red Army had orders from Stalin not to retreat, so only women, children and wounded soldiers were allowed to take the crossing over the wide river to relative safety. The day Stefanov remembers most vividly is Aug. 23, 1942, when hundreds of Nazi planes bombed the city, turning it into a giant burning ruin. Hundreds of Soviet soldiers with wounds bad enough to keep them out of the battle but not severe enough to incapacitate them set out to rescue women and children from the basements of demolished buildings. They rushed them to ferries that would take them across the Volga, a river about 2 kilometers (more than 1 mile) from shore to shore. Fires from spilled oil and gasoline burned on the water, and the defenseless ferries were easy prey for the Nazi planes. The Soviet soldiers covered the children with their own bodies. Stefanov is still haunted by the sight of the soldiers who died, their backs ripped apart. In the city, thousands of dead bodies were left unburied, lying amid the ruins in the sweltering August heat. For the only time during the Battle of Stalingrad, German tanks got to the river, and Soviet tanks and artillery fiercely fought them back. "That was hell, literal hell," Stefanov said. "This one episode to me was equal to the whole war." Stefanov recalls reconnaissance missions deep inside enemy territory, when he had to crawl for hours and hide in ravines to gather intelligence on the location and number of Nazi troops and weapons. In September, 1942, Stefanov was hit in his left hand, a wound that still troubles him. He later returned to active service and was with Soviet troops when they drove the Germans out of Norway and marched into Warsaw and Berlin. He was back in Moscow in late June, 1945, to participate in the Victory Parade on Red Square. Then he went on to China to help drive out the imperial Japanese. Stefanov's contribution to the war effort won him dozens of medals. Although they weigh a combined 11 kilograms (24 pounds), he still wears them pinned to the front of his uniform on holidays and other special occasions. His real reward at the end of the war was his marriage to Lyudmilla, also a decorated war veteran. They are still together 67 years later. "War is not a game, it's the most horrible thing," said Stefanov, who heads a government-run organization of World War II veterans. "That's the thing youngsters should always know."
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Post by chequeredflaggg on Feb 7, 2013 13:55:51 GMT 10
"commies versus nazis, how do you pick a side in that fight?, be like asking wether you wanted rudd or gillard, doesn't matter, you know that either way the countries f***ed!" --------------- choose Rudd or Gillard?? although I cheered Rudds DOWNFALL, and now I would cheer Gillards, verrily it is the Devils Choice between those two f***wits... Honestly, I think forced to make the call on whether or not Rudd has to regain the leadership, Id probably decline, watching that fat little supercillious Milky Bar prick gloating and sneering, more than flesh could bear.. then there is the outside chance, worst possible scenario, that this bunch of f***ing idiot voters might just vote the little prick BACK in.. Strike 1. they took him in the first place, we were sitting pretty and they actually took howard out. then Strike 2, although they didnt actually return Gillard, they failed to vote her out outright.. Anything is possible. Labor hasnt been bringing in Third world brownies and signing them up to citizenship at the rate of the Sorcerers Apprentice carrying buckets of water , for nothing.. Pretty f***en obvious who 90% + of them are going to vote for. Read more: newstalkback1.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=general&thread=1103&page=2#ixzz2KBM2ZVpJ
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Post by slartibartfast on Feb 7, 2013 14:01:39 GMT 10
"commies versus nazis, how do you pick a side in that fight?, be like asking wether you wanted rudd or gillard, doesn't matter, you know that either way the countries f***ed!" --------------- choose Rudd or Gillard?? although I cheered Rudds DOWNFALL, and now I would cheer Gillards, verrily it is the Devils Choice between those two f***wits... Honestly, I think forced to make the call on whether or not Rudd has to regain the leadership, Id probably decline, watching that fat little supercillious Milky Bar prick gloating and sneering, more than flesh could bear.. then there is the outside chance, worst possible scenario, that this bunch of f***ing idiot voters might just vote the little prick BACK in.. Strike 1. they took him in the first place, we were sitting pretty and they actually took howard out. then Strike 2, although they didnt actually return Gillard, they failed to vote her out outright.. Anything is possible. Labor hasnt been bringing in Third world brownies and signing them up to citizenship at the rate of the Sorcerers Apprentice carrying buckets of water , for nothing.. Pretty f***en obvious who 90% + of them are going to vote for. Read more: newstalkback1.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=general&thread=1103&page=2#ixzz2KBM2ZVpJI don't believe Rudd or Gillard were at Stalingrad.
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Post by chequeredflaggg on Feb 7, 2013 14:09:07 GMT 10
What I said was I have not heard of the West giving credit for Stalingrad and celebrating it.
yes, they have.
Id have to insist that we have books and docus and study of Stalingrad coming out of our butts. In fact, with possible exception of Normandy, and maybe trhe BoB which of course isnt aland battle, Id suggest that there has been more said about Stalingrad , than about any single WW2 battle across on the Western side.
they know how important it was.. All that you can really point to HASNT happened much, is that John Wayne and John Mills/Anthony Quayle didnt show up in many old war movies about it.. But eventually we had that Enemy at the Gate show, and the Germans themselves made the other main movie about Stalingrad.
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Post by pim on Feb 7, 2013 15:04:26 GMT 10
Here's a clip from a German movie on Stalingrad I think it's by the German director Volker Schlöndorff but I can't be certain. If it's Schlöndorff it's the same guy as gave the world those two excellent WW2 movies Das Boot and The Tin Drum (or Die Blechtrommel). I've seen Stalingrad in the original German and it is very good. Better than if you see it dubbed in English.
BTW in this clip I like the way they do the English subtitles.
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Post by bender on Feb 7, 2013 16:14:44 GMT 10
What I find interesting here is how Buzz ignores anything that might not fit in his beliefs.
In still insisting that if the Germans had armed the Ukrainians and not sent part of his force to occupy the southeast then he would have won Stalingrad and (even more remarkably) the war.
Buzz in all seriousness, if you can answer these questions satisfafctorily you might be able to argue your scenario. If not, you'd have to ask yourself why you continue to believe what you do.
Where were the German's going to find the Military Age males to man this surrogate army given that they had already all been called up to service with the Soviet Military? The Soviets had orders to leave nothing for the Germans as they retreated through the Ukraine. They burnt farms and the fields and civilians were ordered to retreat northwards.
How were they going to supply this surrogate army when they couldn't even supply their own forces which (as you pointed out) they'd already cut in half?
The Soviets (when Uranus kicked off) had a 6 to 1 advantage in manpower and a 25 to 1 advantage in tanks. The Soviet forces were healthy, had been training for the assault for months and were fully supplied and supported. Assuming your scenario came to pass and there were another half milion men in the german forces, they still would have been outnumbered 2 to 1, they still would have been freezing and starving, and they still wouldn't have had any ammunition to fight with. How would they have not only withstood the Soviet assault, but then been able to counterattack and not only defeat the Soviets at Stalingrad but then carry on with that same starving, weaponless army to defeat the several million men who were to come online in the 2 years ahead.
And lastly, how were the Germans going to stand against the threat of the Atom Bomb which was only a couple of years away.
If you can answer those points (which are things that actually occurred, not hypothetical "what ifs") using factual information that is based on reality then maybe you are justified in maintaining your beliefs.
If not?
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Post by bender on Feb 7, 2013 16:54:36 GMT 10
Well the retreat from Moscow killed 1 million German soldiers did it not? General Winter. Buzz, I don't know where you are getting your information from but it is certainly nowhere close to reality. The total German casualty list for the Battle of Moscow was somewhere between 150,000 and 450,000 (depending on sources), and they didn't lose 1 million men in retreat from Moscow, most of the forces evacuated were carried out by the luftwaffe. Indeed, most of the forces pulled out from the Moscow encirclement who were not evacuated out by air moved to the other front developing to the South, (the one that would become known as Stalingrad). You're not getting confused with Napolean's retreat from Moscow are you?
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Post by bender on Feb 7, 2013 18:59:16 GMT 10
Okay Buzz, you're simply repeating yourself, I think it's pretty easy to understand why.
Why don't you stick to Bird Flu and the long term storage of baked beans. All you're doing here is making a fool of yourself in a new field.
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Post by bender on Feb 7, 2013 19:01:45 GMT 10
What I said was I have not heard of the West giving credit for Stalingrad and celebrating it. yes, they have. Id have to insist that we have books and docus and study of Stalingrad coming out of our butts. In fact, with possible exception of Normandy, and maybe trhe BoB which of course isnt aland battle, Id suggest that there has been more said about Stalingrad , than about any single WW2 battle across on the Western side. they know how important it was.. All that you can really point to HASNT happened much, is that John Wayne and John Mills/Anthony Quayle didnt show up in many old war movies about it.. But eventually we had that Enemy at the Gate show, and the Germans themselves made the other main movie about Stalingrad. there was no official occasion to mark the 70th anniversary - no wreaths laid no mention of it on the news - nothing That's utterly ridiculous, they held services in Russia to commemerate it. What you are suggesting is like saying that Anzac day is unkown because they don't lay wreaths in Russia on April 25 to commemerate it.
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Post by bender on Feb 8, 2013 14:26:02 GMT 10
As I explained to you right back at the start of this thread Buzz, the fact that there is little commemeration of the date here, (apart from the fact that no Australian, other Commonwealth or American troops saw action in the battle) probably has something to do with the fact that the USSR went from being an Allie to the next great threat to face the world before 1949 had rolled into 1950.
If you start holding official commemerations for Stalingrad then where does it stop? Should you also hold one for Leningrad given that that was a far longer lasting seige, the battle of Moscow on the grounds that it was the capital of the USSR that was under attack.
If you know anything about the Eastern Front during WW2 you could name a dozen battles which were more significant in a strategic sense, hell, you could probably do an end run around all that by simply creating a memorial to Georgy Zhukov on the grounds that he always seemed to be there when the Russians were successful.
Stalingrad as a name has probably helped it stick in consciousness, try remembering the battle of the dnipeir, or the kursk bulge (which to this day is the largest mechanised battle the world has ever seen).
If you want a memorial day for it Buzzo you're shit out of luck. They stopped making memorial days a while ago.
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Post by bender on Feb 8, 2013 21:29:54 GMT 10
Buzz has it occurred to you that most participants (whether Miltary or Civilian) might not want to be reminded of it. Nobody had a good time there. The Germans were starving, freezing and running out of ammunition whilst the man who sent them there moved Armies that no longer existed around on maps. (Hitler had replaced the High Command with himself following the failure of Army Group Center to take Moscow).
The Russians and other Ethnicities of the Soviet Army were starving, freezing and had the added incentive to succeed in their attacks of a formation of machine guns behind the front line (which werent running low of ammo) for the express purpose of cutting down anyone who hesitated and who were led by a madman who had come extraordinarily close to giving the Germans a clear route to take his country by virtue of his paranoid purges of the army, (a curious sidebar to that is that Georgy Zhukov, the General who most agree was most influential in the outcome of the war was in 1936 slated for execution during that purge of the Soviet Army only for the warrant to become "lost" in an administrative error.
The civilians were starving, freezing and were subject to summary execution from either side. If they were trapped on the German side of the lines they faced an almost certain trip to the Gulag for a decade or more when the war was over, if they were on the German side they would if found be press ganged into service which held all the dangers of front line combat without a rifle to defend themselves. If they didn't look starving enough they risked accusations of a variety of charges by the NKVD or Political Commissars attached to every military unit.
I don't think you could blame anyone for wanting to forget the whole bloody thing.
Some utterly fascinating stories came out of Stalingrad, but if you looked at any battle of comparable size and scope you would see the same range of stories. Stalingrad has the books written about it, so the stories of Pavlovs house, the Red October Tractor Plant and Vassily Zhaitsev (the famous sniper of whom the 90's movie Enemy at the Gate used a fictionalised version of his life as the central plot element.
The German plan was fatally flawed, the Soviet plan that defeated them relied more then anything on overwhelming numerical superiority combined with the knowledge that the Germans were so low on ammo as to render them defenceless before Uranus began.
They teach about Stalingrad in Staff Colleges around the world, not the battle plans or things like that, but the problems of the Military Force communicating effectively with the Civilian Leadership and preventing the Leadership from trying to micromanage a battle. That's probably the only lesson here. Only a combination of Hitler and Stalin trying to micromanage their respective sides could have led to a deathtoll the size of that witnessed.
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