Nice character vignettes, but...
Reading this, Mark, one would ont imagine that stuff like the imperialist war with
Germany and Japan or Finland happend. One would not imagine what the content
of the 1939 pact was nor that the imperialists genuinely supported the USSR war
effort from Barbarossa onwards. One would also not imagine that the hope of many
left-wing nationalists in Asia were about Japan and not the USSR.
I don't like the mainstream rendering of WWII at all, but yours looks a abit like a
mirror image of it, as much inconsistent.
>But
>Litvinov understood the truth: there could only ever be uneasy, short-lived
>truces, and the Soviet state could never depend on diplomacy or treaty
>arrangements for its security.
Stalin apparently did not, as his abscence of preparation for war against Germany
shows. If Stalin understood this and faced his responsibilities, 1941 wouldn't have
been such a disaster.
>It was Hitler, the record shows, who was constantly outmanoeuvred and
>struggled to keep up: that changed only with Barbarossa, but that was, Stalin
>thought, an act of complete madness, which is why it was so unexpected.
Then why was Stalin bribing Hitler with oil? Why were reconaissance, fortifications,
etc. not carried out? I call that appeasement. That is something that one does when
one's afraid.
And how could Soviet intelligence miss such a huge military deployment as the
one needed to carry out Barbarossa? Unexpected??? No, denied!
> Meanwhile the British army had nearly 60 divisions in India, not to fight the
>Japanese but to garrison the Raj.
This sounds truly extraordinary. What's your source? What kind of divisions were
these? Against what menace were they garrisoning the Raj?
>pending the arrival of the Atomic
>Bomb, the Americans were anxious to secure Soviet assistance against Japan
What for? Why would the US need assistance? Unlike in 1942, they had a vast
economic and military superiority and had devised effective tactics.
>The heroism of the French Resistance
???
Sorry for the hairsplitting,
Julien
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