On 10/18/07, Douglas Woodard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In June and July 1940 there were plenty of practical-minded appeasers > like Lord Halifax and Rab Butler at the top of the British Conservative > Party who were thinking about asking Hitler for terms. We owe Churchill > a lot.
of course there were voices in favor of capitulation. just as there were in the u.s. (though it was more of a neutrality/isolationist sentiment). this hardly amounted to a large outcry. i wouldn't even characterize it as a strong headwind. > The Russians may have done most of the fighting and shed most of the > Allied blood, but they would have been in deep trouble without American > supplies. the brits would have been in even deeper trouble: nearly 80% of all lend-lease went to the uk. the importance of lend lease to the ussr, while not negligible, tends to be exaggerated. it really was small compared to the overall soviet output over the course of the war, and served mainly to complement soviet output which had not yet been put on a full war footing. they were able to mobilize a lot more people than they could supply with arms and equipment. had there been no lend lease, the outcome on the eastern front would not have been very different. > They would also have been in trouble without British codebreaking (which > owed much to the Poles originally). It seems that "Lucy" and the Red > Orchestra in Switzerland who transmitted to Moscow, were fed carefully > with Ultra intercepts by the British, presented to Moscow as the result > of Soviet espionage. > > The successful German counterattack at Kharkov after Stalingrad seems to > have occurred because von Manstein was able for a while to make > decisions on his own without consulting German headquarters by radio and > being exposed to British eavesdropping, because of the temporarily poor > state of German communications due to the rapid retreat. yep, those russkies were just a bunch of bumbling idiots who would never have gotten anywhere without the secret, unseen hand of the brits' paternalistic guidance. look, i mean no disrespect, but three quarters of all german casualties were suffered on the eastern front at the hands of soviet forces. you can't just sweep that away with a simple reference to lend-lease and code-breaking. > Stalin and the Soviet system were responsible for the miserable state of > the Russian army in 1941, and for Hitler's ability to catch the Russians > ill-prepared to resist in the early stages of his campaign. stalin's purges came at a cost, yes (but you err in conflating stalin with the soviet system). nevertheless, the red army was reorganising and re-equipping. and their foresight in relocating huge portions of their industrial capacity to the eastern hinterland proved decisive. the brits and pretty much all of europe were equally irresponsible and ill-prepared. > Doug Woodard > St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada > > > Chris Burck wrote: > > did i sleep through a lecture back wien i was in school, or something? > > because i don't remenber about a loud outcry in favor of capitulation > > during the blitz. and where defeating nazi germany is concerned, the > > soviets deserve at least 50% of the credit, maybe even two thirds. > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Biofuel mailing list > Biofuel@sustainablelists.org > http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel > > Biofuel at Journey to Forever: > http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html > > Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): > http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ > _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
