Search results for query: *

Forum search Google search

  1. AHC: better behaved Red Army

    Also this Erenburg quote was looking weird to me, so I decided to look for the original article. It actually doesn't have anything like that. There is a direct translation of the piece: The article lacks "Have no mercy on the women, children, or the aged! Kill every German--wipe them out!"...

  2. AHC: better behaved Red Army

    Stalin indeed wielded an absurd amount of power personally. He just used this power not to control what other people do. He used that power to appoint people who did things for him. Stalin was almost a definition of macro-managing dictator. Yeah, this particular piece belongs to Ilya Erenburg...

  3. AHC: better behaved Red Army

    Does it come from Tito after Yugoslav-Soviet split? I very much doubt that Stalin would have said something like that. It is just stupid mustache twirling villain shit. It is another fine example of memetic Stalin being quite different from the real one. Stalin was many things but definitely...

  4. AHC: better behaved Red Army

    Stalin did exactly that. There is no indication that Stalin ever wanted 'to exact revenge' or somehow encouraged such behaviors or gave orders to military leadership to not react. While the orders to do the exact opposite actually exist and documented to be enforced. There are military tribunal...

  5. WI: 1999 Russian Apartment Bombings Exposed?

    "Jet fuel cannot melt steel beams".

  6. Barbarossa without the Great Purge

    Tukhachevsky wasn't popular either in the army nor among the wider populace. It is Stalin who actually was popular and it is the reason why he was able to get away with a lot of the shit he did.

  7. Into the Fire - the "Minor" nations of WW2 strike back

    You misunderstood my point. Moral qualms were real. People didn't like the after-effects of chemical weapon usage and considered it horrific. But it was not the main factor behind refusal to use it. The main factor was that chemical weapons do not do much that you cannot do with conventional...

  8. Into the Fire - the "Minor" nations of WW2 strike back

    It wouldn't. WW2-era poison agents suck as area denial weapons because they dissipate very quickly and simply not persistent enough. Yes, you can kill a bunch of horses by dropping a mustard gas on them. You can kill them the same by dropping regular bombs and not bother with mustard gas...

  9. Into the Fire - the "Minor" nations of WW2 strike back

    If you expend the same amount of delivery platforms and ordinance tonnage on conventional explosives the result would be better than if you try to use WW2-era poison agents. It is just that simple. Chemical weapons were a cheap substitute to the conventional explosives, if you have a choice...

  10. Barbarossa without the Great Purge

    To clarify the issue somewhat: I do not claim that dual command system was in any way beneficial. What I'm saying that Soviet command system was disfunctional on so many levels for so many different reasons that specifically dual command was very low on the totem pole of problems. It is...

  11. Barbarossa without the Great Purge

    Pre-Purge generals for the most part were of the same breed (so to speak) as the post-Purge ones. As I said previously, Purges were essentially random as they propagated around personal connections of people with very little dependence on their backgrounds, biographies and competencies. So...

  12. AHC: optimize Soviet performance in WW2

    When this idea will die in fire at last? Germany fought for FOUR freaking years without any deliveries of oil or any other materials from the Soviet Union. Soviet-German trade was not that important. Germany spent more oil and oil products (probably by few orders of magnitude) attacking the...

  13. Barbarossa without the Great Purge

    It is again something of a centerpiece of mythology about Red Army. Soviet commanders had plenty of local initiative and freedom and they were rather fond of utilizing it for good and ill. Which was entire purpose behind system of the commissars - to keep that initiative in check. Not that it...

  14. Barbarossa without the Great Purge

    Basically, the answer is simple. Purges were entirely incidental to the outcome of Barbarossa. They barely affected it because the issues that the Red Army had and which were defining the performance difference between the Red Army and the Wermacht were not caused by the Great Purge. Let's use...

  15. How could've Trotsky took power?

    Trotsky primary issue was his personality and approach to relationships. He basically aggravated the entirety of higher echelon of the Bolshevik party by the end of the Civil War and so he had no real support base. It is the reason why it was so easy for Stalin to remove him from power, while he...

  16. Would Operation Unthinkable have been launched if it was discovered that Stalin was having his own version of the Holocaust during WW2?

    Polish and Czech civilians knew the difference between honorable and not so honorable Germans very well at that point and didn't think much of it. There was a peculiar trend in Red Army reports about occupation of the areas which had mixed Polish and German populations. German civilians usually...

  17. Would Operation Unthinkable have been launched if it was discovered that Stalin was having his own version of the Holocaust during WW2?

    How many hundreds of thousands of lives of their countrymen Truman and Churchill would be willing to pay to save Eastern Europe from Stalin? Especially as Czechs and Poles will defect to the Soviets in droves after seeing that British and Americans are bringing Germans back with them.

  18. What if Germany Won the Battle of Stalingrad?

    It is actually a difficult question to answer. Yes, technically Germans made Stalingrad strategically useless by the mere fact of being on the outskirts and reaching Volga on the either side of the city. But in practice, if Germans stop, the Soviets wouldn't funnel so much of their force...

  19. What if Germany Won the Battle of Stalingrad?

    It is almost the opposite of what actually happened. Soviet armies weren't too concentrated at the border which made them supposedly vulnerable to encirclement. Soviet armies were not concentrated enough to offer a serious resistance. If Stalin actually packed the border with the Soviet troops...

  20. What is the best case scenario for the USSR Post Brezhnev?

    Stavropol is definintely not Crimea.
Top