Stalin and Zhukov review the Red Army at Lenin's Tomb
That is the question UCLA English professor and book critic Benjamin Schwarz takes on in the May 2007 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, in his review of several new books about the Russo-German War of 1941-1945.
The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union sparked the bloodiest campaign in human history, and Schwarz by and large agrees with the latest crop of books that dismiss the entire Western Allies effort in the Second World War as an overhyped sideshow to the real war in the East.
In what may be even more offensive to British and American readers, Schwarz goes a step further and credits Josef Stalin's leadership for saving the Soviet Union from collapse in the winter of 1941-1942, and eventually allowing his superb generals led by Georgy Zhukov to lead the Red Army to victory. "Stalin...saved the world for democracy."
Click on the extended post and scroll down to read the original Atlantic Monthly article.
Map depicting the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union - 1941-1942 (Source: Wikipedia)
Nevermind that Stalin 's pact with Hitler gave the Nazi war machine free reign to conquer most of Western Europe in 1940, or that Stalin's dogged insistence that Hitler would never betray him allowed the invaders to methodically encircle the Red Army's corps until they reached the gates of Moscow in December 1941. Stalin's urge to immediately counterattack, while saving the Soviet capital, also led to another Red Army tank corps being cut off and chewed up by the Wehrmacht in the spring of 1942.
German Tiger tanks operating in Russia. The Red Army began the war with more and better quality tanks than the Wehrmacht - but failed to exploit these advantages until after it had suffered heavy losses
The failure of this offensive emboldened Hitler to divert resources further south towards the Caucuses, where the Nazi leader committed his own blunder by concentrating on capturing the city of Stalingrad rather than securing the oil fields in the Caucuses. The Soviets routed the Germans' Italian and Romanian Axis rearguard, and then completed their encirclement of the German 6th Army, shattering the myth of Nazi military invincibility.
A war-winning weapon - the Soviet T-34 tank
Schwarz's review (you can read the full article below) does have its strong points. Schwarz admits that Stalin's paranoia and errors almost led to crushing defeats in the summer of 1941, and that General Zhukov's memoirs grossly exaggerated the size of the German forces he typically faced. While the balance of troop strength and airpower on several sectors of the Eastern Front was almost dead even in June 1941, the Soviets had a huge advantage in artillery and tanks that they failed to exploit until the turning point at Kursk in 1943.
Schwarz also reminds his readers that Zhukov also was indeed a complicated figure, periodically in and out of favor at Stalin's court and with the Politburo that succeeded the Soviet dictator. Zhukov was a survivor, who was lucky to be assigned to the Russian Far East, and to enjoy some successes repulsing a half-hearted Japanese attack on the region, during the time that Stalin was busy purging the Red Army officer corps. Zhukov also learned a great deal from his greatest defeat suffered in the fall of 1942 - the failure of Operation Mars.
Was Stalin guilty of plotting an attack on Europe in 1941
and shortly before his death in 1953?
Most interestingly for readers, Schwarz alludes indirectly to the highly controversial theory, widely disseminated by the Soviet defector/historian Viktor Suvorov in his book Icebreaker, that Stalin had secret plans to launch an invasion of central Europe in the late summer of 1941.
[A similar "Stalin was planning to invade" theory, this one set at the start of the Cold War, was advanced by the Czech historian Karel Bartosek in his contribution to The Black Book of Communism. Bartosek and his coauthors suggest on page 433 that during the spring of 1952, while the U.S. was preoccupied with the Korean War, that Stalin was preparing the Soviet bloc for war, and only Stalin's convenient death from a stroke in March 1953 may have spared Europe from World War III and Soviet cities from mass destruction by American atomic bombs. Certainly, there is little doubt among Cold War historians that the U.S. enjoyed overwhelming nuclear superiority in the early 50s and that the Soviet Air Force would have offered little resistance to General Curtis LeMay's SAC bombers.]
Schwarz mentions David M. Glantz, the preeminent American historian of the Russo-German War, as having thoroughly rebutted this claim in his book Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War. Schwarz points out that standard Soviet military doctrine in 1941 called for responding to any invasion with an immediate counteroffensive, which Glantz demonstrates in the book is a reason why so many units of the Red Army were encircled and destroyed by the Germans in the opening months of the war.
From my point of view, there are two major flaws in Schwarz's arguments for his thesis that we owe Stalin the credit for winning the war, besides Stalin's responsibility for catastrophic Soviet defeats early in the war and Zhukov's revisionist accounts:
The first is that the German generals' postwar arguments that the invasion of the Soviet Union was likely doomed from the start by Russia's vast resources of manpower and materiel remain valid, and cannot be dismissed as merely telling the victorious Western Allies what they wanted to hear. Schwarz implies that the German generals claimed that they were beaten solely by sheer numbers, and not by the superior military leadership and organization of their Soviet opponents. Even so, the physical vastness of Russia, and the fact that the blitzkrieg-ing Wehrmacht was still a mostly horse-drawn army with highly mobile mechanized units as spearheads, meant that Hitler was indeed delusional to believe that his forces could avoid the fate of Napoleon's army.
The USSR received 375,000 trucks from the U.S. Lend Lease program
The second flawed argument Schwarz makes is that during the Battle of the Bulge, at the height of the fighting on the Western front, the Allies only faced 12% of the German Army's strength. This is true, but there are two additional factors that should be weighed in the Western Allies' favor in terms of their contributions to winning the war:
British and American bombers diverted the Luftwaffe to defending the Nazi homeland
1) The combined Anglo-American bombing offensive, while it failed to halt Nazi war production (which peaked in 1944) or destroy German morale, did succeed in diverting the bulk of the Luftwaffe away from the Eastern Front. By the spring of 1944 this contributed to the Soviet Air Force having overwhelming numerical superiority in the skies over Eastern Europe, which added to the success of Zhukov's Red blitzkrieg (aka Operation Bagration) during the summer of 1944. After the disasters of Stalingrad and Kursk, Bagration was the third hammer blow (along with the prospect of Germany surrendering to the Western allies after the Battle of Normandy) to the Nazi Empire. Of course, it was precisely the hope of surrendering to the British and Americans that gave the Germans something left to fight for as the Red Army closed in on Berlin in 1945.
2) Trucks - while no one doubts that the Red Army could have crushed Nazi Germany by itself, American lend-lease provided the Soviets with hundreds of thousands of light and heavy duty trucks. The Red Army could not have transformed itself from a horse supplied force to a highly mobile war machine without these American imports.
Red Army Katyushas mounted on American trucks
Thus, without the successful landing in Normandy, the combined bombing offensive, and the miracles of American wartime production, the Red Army may have staggered into Berlin in 1946 or even 1947, with an even greater loss of life on all sides (in reality, the Red Army lost 300,000 soldiers taking the Nazi capitol). And of course, all of Central Europe and perhaps even France and Italy might have turned Communist in the postwar environment. In reality, the success of West German capitalism alongside the failures of East German socialism hastened the demise of the Communist empire, and ultimately, the rebirth of capitalism and democratic institutions in Russia.
Stalin’s Gift
by Benjamin Schwarz
The Atlantic Monthly | May 2007
It’s time for those (mostly male) readers interested in the Second World War to put down that umpteenth account of D‑Day and turn to the new crop of books on the most colossal conflict the world has ever seen: the German-Soviet clash on the Eastern Front. Since the late 1980s, a historiographical revolution has been under way, as scholars fundamentally alter their understanding of this epic struggle, which killed 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians and nearly 4 million Wehrmacht troops. They aren’t merely revising an established narrative; they’re discovering facets of the conflict—even entire battles—that had been lost to history.
Churchill’s chronicle of the Second World War, which has all but permanently fixed the contours of the conflict in the popular mind, deliberately played down the Soviet superpower’s pivotal role in defeating the Axis. Since then, while scholarship advanced on, say, the Allies’ air war against Germany or the North African campaigns, it was stalled or warped on the Eastern Front. The U.S.S.R. documented its war more thoroughly than any of the other contestants, but Soviet historians were forced to evade the many aspects of the conflict that the state deemed embarrassing. For their part, Western scholars, denied access to Soviet archives, relied on German records and the self-serving memories of German generals. (The United States, in a Cold War effort to glean insight from its former enemy on how to combat its erstwhile ally, employed former Wehrmacht officers to examine and evaluate captured German documents. General Franz Halder, Hitler’s chief of the Army General Staff from 1938 to 1942 and a man almost certainly complicit in crimes against humanity, headed the project for the U.S. Army’s Historical Division; John F. Kennedy awarded him the Meritorious Civilian Service Award for his efforts.)
The first to circumvent some of these constraints was the British historian John Erickson in his grand two-volume history, The Road to Stalingrad (1975) and The Road to Berlin (1983). Since the Cold War’s end, many others have been tapping the extraordinarily rich vein of archival material.
The West’s foremost active scholar of the “Great Patriotic War,” David Glantz, a former U.S. Army colonel, has written more than 60 (!) highly detailed monographs on the Red Army and its military operations. Historians will be exploiting his meticulous and creative historical spadework for generations. (His most recent study, Red Storm Over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania, Spring 1944, was published late last year.)
The British historian Mark Harrison has probed the Soviet wartime economic mobilization and planning efforts; these ruthless endeavors were brilliant, surprisingly flexible, and decisive in winning the war, but the consensus seems to be that the Soviet economy never recovered. Nikolai Litvin’s just-released memoir, 800 Days on the Eastern Front, offers a harrowing grunt’s-eye view of the war. And a host of scholars are exploring such specialized subjects as the Soviet treatment of POWs; the wartime ethnic-cleansing campaigns directed against potentially collaborationist minority groups (2 million members of suspect minorities were uprooted from their homelands, and at least 231,000 of them died); and the role of the secret police in nearly every aspect of the war. (The NKVD’s main military function was to keep Red Army soldiers facing rather than fleeing the enemy, a task it carried out in its customarily sanguine fashion. The Soviets executed more than 158,000 soldiers for desertion. “In the Red Army,” noted Marshal Georgi Zhukov, “it takes a very brave man to be a coward.”)
J ust last year, three British authors published works of extraordinary literary merit. Antony Beevor, probably the most stylish writer on Russia’s war, followed up his piercing Stalingrad (1998) and The Fall of Berlin (2002) with A Writer at War, a translation (with Luba Vinogradova) of the great Russian writer Vasily Grossman’s previously unpublished front-line notebooks that manages to be at once precise and poetic. It is, I think, the best eyewitness account of the Eastern Front available in English. Catherine Merridale issued her pioneering and panoramic portrait of the ordinary Russian soldier, Ivan’s War. And the diplomat and historian Rodric Braithwaite published Moscow 1941, his sweeping, atmospheric (and in the United States, alas, largely ignored) account of life in the threatened city and of the Battle of Moscow—a contest that claimed the lives of some 926,000 Red Army soldiers.
A number of new books—all building on Omer Bartov’s 1985 study, The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare— have dissected the Germans’ “war of annihilation” against the Soviets. These include The Attack on the Soviet Union, a volume in the official German history of the war, and, most recently, Wolfram Wette’s The Wehrmacht. These works have conclusively demonstrated that the Wehrmacht—and not, as postwar accounts by German generals would have it, merely the SS—freely and even eagerly joined in murder and genocide, which were central, rather than incidental, features of its effort.
The most sophisticated recent studies of the Holocaust itself—Christopher Browning’s masterpiece, The Origins of the Final Solution; and the just- published The Years of Extermination, the second and concluding volume of Saul Friedländer’s summa, Nazi Germany and the Jews—inextricably fix the German war on the Eastern Front to the center of their story. For all the ferocious treatment of Jews in Poland, for all of Hitler’s nebulous exhortations going back to the 1920s, it was the unprecedented scale and viciousness of Germany’s attempted conquest of the Soviet Union that decisively radicalized the Nazis and crystallized their vision of liquidating European Jewry.
The deluge of new archival materials relating to the Eastern Front has been so steady that the two standard post- glasnost single-volume chronicles—Glantz’s When Titans Clashed and Richard Overy’s Russia’s War—have already been overtaken by new sources. Evan Mawdsley, a British historian, has stepped into the breach with his crisply written Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945. This exceptionally precise and judicious work, now the authoritative general history, is especially useful because it largely supports some of the most provocative arguments in two new, not-so-judicious books: Stalin’s Wars, a minute examination of Stalin’s wartime leadership, by Geoffrey Roberts; and Europe at War, 1939–1945, by Norman Davies.
Davies, the author of the gigantic Europe: A History and the magisterial, sparkling, two-volume history of Poland, God’s Playground, has written a shorter (544-page) work that is really two extended arguments with a lot of superfluous material. Although it seems to have been hastily and hotly written and contains too many embarrassing errors, it rearranges and juxtaposes facts and events in often unexpectedly illuminating ways. Most important, it’s infused with irony and paradox, qualities essential to comprehending history but largely absent from the American view of the Second World War.
Davies finds insufferable a perspective on the conflict that emphasizes El Alamein, the Normandy landings, and the Bulge, and he condemns the American moral narcissism that holds that, to quote Stephen Ambrose, it was U.S. soldiers who would “win the war against Nazi Germany,” and that Americans “stopped Hitler.” Rather, he contends that “two core issues”—“proportionality” and “criminality”—“provide the key” to properly grasping the war in Europe.
As for the first, he recognizes that the Eastern Front was without question the pivotal theater of the war: For four years, more than 400 Red Army and German divisions clashed in an unrelenting series of military operations over a front extending more than 1,000 miles. (At its most intense, the war in the West was fought between 15 Allied and 15 Wehr‑ macht divisions.) Eighty-eight percent of the German military dead fell there; in July 1943, in the decisive battle of the war, the Soviets permanently broke the Wehrmacht’s capacity for large-scale attack at Kursk, “the one name,” Davies properly asserts, “which all historians of the Second World War should remember.” He goes on to argue:
The Soviet war effort was so overwhelming that impartial historians of the future are unlikely to rate the British and American contribution to the European theatre as much more than a sound supporting role.
So (and this brings us to Davies’s second point) the most odious criminal regime in Europe’s history was defeated by an even more murderous regime, if numbers are the yardstick—which significantly tarnishes any notion of the “Good War.”
In the face of persuasive evidence, Davies is compelled to extend this already provocative argument. Although an anti-Stalinist stance is de rigueur these days, he possesses a most pronounced Polophilia (the single positive bias evident in this acerbic book) and is thus especially passionate in his assessment of the crimes of the man who, in partnership with Hitler, tore Poland asunder and later subjected it to nearly half a century of Soviet vassalage.
Davies could have employed the line the German generals promulgated after the war (thanks to their efforts, it became the conventional wisdom): that the Soviets owed their success only to Hitler’s stupendous strategic mismanagement and ruinous interference in military operations, together with the sheer size of the Red Army. Or he could have followed the line put forward by the Soviets in the period of “de-Stalinization”: that the Russian people, divorced from their leadership, secured victory by means of their patriotic energies. Instead, despite his abundant distaste for Stalin, he acknowledges the consensus of all the recent work I’ve discussed. Writing of Stalin, Davies declares: “The victory of 1945 in Europe was above all his.”
This consensus, most baldly stated by Roberts, concedes that no leader in history was responsible for graver military failures—from his stunning miscalculation concerning the German attack to his insistence on premature and obscenely wasteful counteroffensives in 1941 and much of ’42. But also evident is the iron resolve Stalin displayed in the Battle of Moscow, his perspicacity in calling Zhukov to command the effort, and the harsh will he helped summon in his subjects throughout the war. (Stalin’s pistol- at-the-head command—“Not a step back”—issued on the eve of Stalingrad inspiringly conveyed to the Soviets the desperation of their situation, and the dry ruthlessness with which the state would tackle it.)
Most important, Stalin transformed himself and the military he commanded. Beginning in late 1942 with preparations for the Battle of Stalingrad, his newfound grasp of military strategy and operations is as inexplicable as it is plain. He orchestrated every level of the Soviet war effort—from the miraculous economic recovery to high diplomacy to operational planning—even as he encouraged argument from, and increasingly heeded the counsel proffered by, the remarkable group of military advisers with whom he surrounded himself: Zhukov, Chief of Staff Alexander Vasilevsky, and Chief of Operations Aleksei Antonov—all men of penetrating intelligence, exceptional abilities, and extraordinary character. With this triumvirate, along with such commanders as Konstantin Rokossovsky, Stalin put in the service of his state the finest generals of the Second World War.
The improved organization, equipment, supply, training, and command of the Red Army won the Battle of Stalingrad, thereby turning the tide in the war. By Kursk, the Red Army was precisely choreographing an operation of unprecedented scale. From then on, it was conducting ever more sophisticated and devastating “deep operations”: extremely rapid, combined-arms advances that penetrated far into the Wehrmacht’s rear areas—the most inventive and shattering feats of arms achieved by any military during the war. The Soviet army had undergone probably the most profound and rapid turnaround of any military organization in history.
To be sure, part of Stalin’s accomplishment lay in his allowing his most talented subordinates to do their job, an attribute of all great warlords. From late 1942 on, he encouraged greater initiative and flexibility within the high command, and he presided over a military organization that fostered increased operational and tactical dynamism and innovation. But the new accounts—which even draw on transcripts of telephone and telegraphic conversations with his front-line generals—all go further than that, and put Stalin at the center of the Soviets’ awesome military achievement. Davies’s conclusion, that the victory was Stalin’s, would seem inarguable. Roberts’s unpalatable one, which goes one step further, will confound those who like their history neat:
To make so many mistakes and to rise from the depths of such defeat to go on to win the greatest military victory in history was a triumph beyond compare … Stalin … saved the world for democracy.
For more on these topics and other historical debates about the Soviet Union in World War II, check out the interesting Kunikov's Book Reviews website. You can also read a debate between historians about Stalin's hand in winning WWII here
Comments
Shhhhh ! Psssst !
Charles ? Are you crazy ? Your are ruining the undisputable Anglo-Saxon supremacy theory carefully developed in the past 60+ years.
Denying that neither Russians nor Germans are incapable, ill-mannered or simply inferior to Anglo-Saxons ruins the work of generations of British and American scholars telling their coutrymen, from craddle to grave, that they are the one and only superpowers and superior to the rest of the world. ;-)
Posted by: Heribert Schindler | April 11, 2007 11:37 AM
Heribert,
I am suggesting that Russia won the war in 1945 and not 46 or 47 because of the western Allies, and that those 300,000 Dodge and Ford trucks made Zhukov's Red Bliztkrieg in the summer of 1944 possible.
Of course, as in WWI, the prospect of surrendering to the British and Americans vs. the more implacable foe (the French in WWI, the Russians in WWII) greatly reduced the German will to fight in the West (of course, without Lenin and the Russian collapse in 1917, Ludendorff's last throw in the spring of 1918 would have proved impossible, but as Niall Ferguson grimly notes, the Germans killed a lot more than they lost in WWI - and they also came a lot closer to victory).
I like Fritz Fischer's Griff Nach der Weltmacht (The Grasp for World Power), even if I think that it views German war aims in WWI through the lense of post-WWII Germany (Fischer's thesis is that Ludendorff had the same economic objectives as the Nazis - dominate the Baltic states and Ukraine and even perhaps the Caucuses, without Hitler's genocidal ideology).
Other than killing a lot of German civilians, the major impact the strategic bombing campaign had was diverting the Luftwaffe from the Eastern Front, to the point that the Russians had won almost total air superiority by mid 1944. The other minor successes came when the Allies got the P-51 Mustang and could finally could target Germany's coal to liquids plants and railyards in the summer of 1944. At that point, the Wehrmacht was forced to take the lion's share of the fuels the Luftwaffe had left and prioritize fuel for tanks and armor over supporting trucks. That left the Wehrmacht as essentially a horse drawn army facing mechanized adversaries.
Besides hopeless odds and the fact that the Russians were much closer to Berlin, this was another reason why the Ardennes offensive was ludicrous - the Germans expected to seize fuel dumps, and when the Allies blew them up, those heavy Tigers and Panthers backed by a bunch of 17 year old SS kids hopped up on meth simply ran out of gas, and became sitting ducks.
Posted by: Charles Ganske | April 19, 2007 11:04 AM
Charles, you missed the ";-)" at the end of my post.
Posted by: Heribert Schindler | April 19, 2007 12:30 PM
Charles,
Shheeezzzz... this is an interesting subject...
I visited this memorial in Belarus: http://www.khatyn.by
It's simply changed everything for me.
Ask my wife's grandmother who was in Belarus running an anti aircraft gun, you will get one answer... to complicate things more, most of my family in Germany was fighting the Nazis while a few crazy relatives joined the Nazi party (like I have some relatives still in the GOP).
Regardless, Belarus suffered tremendously.
Khatyn is to honor the 1 in every 4 people that died, 2.3 million Belarusians. Together with Russians and Ukrainians that won WW2. As for the West, I’m sure, like we are in Iraq today; America was there because of her interests. US soldiers of WW2 and of Iraq today were there unbeknownst to them; they were there for the US economy. These were great men from then and today. But at least WW2 was clear and noble cause.
And Gates (words by Bush / Cheney) says we need a missile defense system because Russia is unpredictable? Friggen idiot!!! And an insult to those that died.
I'll bet anything the Germans will be at it again well before the Russians ever attack anyone.
Here is George Carlin explaining the difference between the US and Nazi Germany, it’s hilarious:
http://www.therussiansarehere.com/vid/gCarlin/video-white-people.mov
http://www.therussiansarehere.com/vid/gCarlin/video-only-war.mov
And honestly, eventually Europe will appreciate Russia and the CIS and things will be positive and mutual. A world war with Germany & Russia I believe will not happen again. But it's the US that scares me. It was damn clear Hitler was a loony… But today, they come up with these screwy stories about wmd here or yellow cake or Saddam did 9/11. Today, you need to dig around a heck of a lot of marketing and religion.
Posted by: Luther G. Quick | April 19, 2007 12:41 PM
Heribert,
I'm sorry if you misunderstand. What British and Americans have been teaching their children is the concept that a free and open democratic society is superior to governmental systems that require concentration camps, gulags, violent repressions against people exercising their God-given rights to free speech and assembly, state-sanctioned political executions, and subjugation of individual economic self-determination. The Germans seem to have figured that out, and, with luck, maybe the Russians will someday, too.
Posted by: James | April 19, 2007 1:26 PM
James,
What are in those brownies your are eating?
Which country are you talking about? I mean yapping about gulags and camps and repressions? Are you talking about the US in Iraq today? Gitmo? Abu Grarib? Repression as in Black slavery in America?
Or are you worried the the US can't get it's sh!t hooks around Russian gas / oil and for this, you dig up the past? Ok, let's dig up not only Britich and US past, let look at TODAY !!
But first, Russia was just as much a prisoner in the Soveit Union as the rest of the CIS. Remememer, Stalin was a Georgian, and it must have been just an accident that most of his closest people were also Georgian.
Anyway... "British and Americans have teaching their kids what?"
Here's a video on your TEACHINGS.
http://www.therussiansarehere.com/vid/gCarlin/video-WeLikeWar.mov
Posted by: Luther G. Quick | April 19, 2007 2:47 PM
Don't worry Heribert - as a White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, I got the joke...
It always puzzles me why people try to work out whether the Soviet Union, or the United States/Great Britain won the war.
It's always seemed pretty clear to me that neither was likely to win the war alone (although it is possible that either could have done so, eventually, after many years of drawn out struggle). Instead, the Western and Eastern allies worked together very effectively, each playing to their strengths very well - the USSR using its overwhelming manpower, the US its economic muscle and GB its remnants of Empire.
(Which is not to stereotype any of these strengths. The US also used lots of men, and the USSR brought more than just manpower to the war - for example, its industrial base to its scientific and engineering ingenuity).
Anyway, starting to ramble now - great article Charles.
Posted by: Andy | April 19, 2007 2:48 PM
Andy,
It's interesting to think about what might have happened had Hitler not turned on Stalin, or been much smarter when he did (per John Keegan's scenario in the book What If...?) by seizing Mideast oil fields before attacking Russia through the Caucuses via Turkey. The anti-British Al-Rashid coup in Iraq suggests that the Nazis would have had many ready collaborators (one of the conspirators in that anti-British plot was Saddam Hussein's uncle).
For his part, Churchill had secret plans to bomb the Caucuses oil fields as late as August 1942 to keep them out of Nazi hands.
I suspect that the U.S. and USSR would still have allied in John Keegan's Mideast war scenario, but that atomic bombs might have been dropped on Germany as well as Japan before the war was over. That was the reason the U.S. drew up plans for the B-36 Peacemaker bomber in 1942, and after it was built no fighter plane in the world could touch it for a few years. I do not think short of leaving the USSR alone or a coup against Stalin the Nazis could possibly have won once they embarked on a direct attack on Russia - unlike the Germans in WWI who came very close to creating Mitteleuropa with Poland, Ukraine and the Baltics as vassal states.
I suppose some older Germans still kick around the idea of how things might have turned out had Von Stauffenberg's plot to kill Hitler succeeded and Germany surrendered to the Western Allies in August or September 1944, before the Red Army crossed the Vistula.
Posted by: Charles Ganske | April 19, 2007 3:13 PM
@ Andy and Charles
I'm glad (at least) Andy caught my sarcasm. Well ...
Maybe both of you have seen the movie "The Longest Day" ? If so, you might remember this crazy (funny) Frenchman on his bike, wearing a firebrigade-helmet, riding down that village road on June 6th 1944 shouting at the top of his voice "DeGaulle is here, he came to liberate us and brought a few Americans with him".
Basically this is what I was pointing out with my sarcasm.
WW II is still a topic, mostly a topic for those who are too young to have participated.
From most of the Americans I know I hear the statement "hey, we won it", completely ignoring the effort other nations took to end the war.
The Russians I know are p***** off because they rightfully point out the number of countrymen they lost during the war and that the Red Army was the force to reach Berlin fist and, throughout the war, faced and fought the bulk (and the best) of Germany's forces.
The British are a more laid back, the British I talked to pointed out their success fighting Rommel in Africa and fighting the Luftwaffe during the "Battle of Britain". Being a former "Luftwaffe Mann" myself, although not a WW II veteran (I was born 19 years after the war) I am particularly interested in the air war during WW II. I attended reunions of former WWII pilots, one reunion taking place in Britain, were former RAF and Luftwaffe pilots talked to each other respectfully, buying each other pints, comparing the ME109 to the Spitfire.
Former German Luftwaffe pilots participated in a commemorating service in Coventry, former RAF pilots donated a large sum of money to the fund used to re-erect the "Frauenkirche" in Dresden.
To address the view of some "unconvincables" in Germany:
Nobody is fond about having lost a war, so there are quite a few German WW II veterans who are convinced that Germany has lost the war for having had the "wrong allies". They blame mostly the Italians and partly the Romanians.
The Italians are blamed because Mussolini is accused of having tried to bite off a larger chunk than he could chew and swallow. Many German vets say that Rommel would have never been sent to Africa and the Wehrmacht would have never fought on the Balkans hadn't the Italians boldly started their campaigns in Libya and Albania, got stuck and had cried for Germany to get them out of the trouble.
Many believe that, hadn't "Barbarossa" been delayed several times to "help the Italians on the Balkans", the Wehrmacht wouldn't have got stuck in the snow at Moscow in 1941 and the war would have been over in 1941.
The Romanians are blamed, by some, for not having held "that flank" at Stalingrad, permitting the Soviets to encircle the German 6th Army and causing the debacle.
However, regardless who is "responsible" for winning / losing the war, the war wasn't lost or won by a single nation.
In the historical context one could even speak of the fact that the war wasn't even caused by a single nation because we could argue that hadn't the "Treaty of Versailles" been that harsh for Germany, Hitler would have never been able to rise to power and would never have been able to start WW II.
Anyway, I am not in favour of meriting a single nation for having won or blaming a single nation for having lost WW II.
People tend to forget that Fascism in Italy inspired Hitler, Mussolini clearly encouraged Hitler in the course of the war and had a clear vision on how to shape Europe after the war. So Italy is as guilty of starting WW II as Germany, unfortunately this is neither discussed nor evaluated. Neither "back then" nor today.
As to the American contribution to the war effort, it's hard to determine why America got engaged in WWII.
Of course, Americans are being told today that America came to fight for democracy and freedom in Europe. This might be true (to some extend) but certainly is only one side of the coin.
America pumped billions uf US$ into the British war machine. When the German "U-Boote" kept sinking vessels faster than Britain could build them and theatend to "strangle" Britain, America feared to lose her investments and started escorting British convoys.
The first "hostilities" between the USA and Germany took place on the Atlantic and I think it's undisputable that by escorting the British convoys America left the path of neutrality and openly sided Britain, provoking Germany to declare war (on the USA).
To make a long story short, America didn't win WW II all by herself, teaching the American youth that she did (or suggesting she did) is wrong. Teaching that America joined the war just and only to defend democracy and to fight fascism is wrong as well.
This kind of "teaching" suggests / creats a myth which simply isn't true.
Teaching young Americans that "the land of the free and the home of the brave" never did any wrong, never acted according to America's best interests but always to "bring freedom and democracy" leads to an tremendous "superiority complex", resulting in spirit of the "one and only superpower" which can strike wherever, whenever and whoever it feels to do so and will always be right and legitim.
This teaching prevents Americans from considering what unilateral American actions, be it the war in Iraq or the "Missile Shield" in Eastern Europe, can and will cause.
This teaching is reflected by posts, such as the one by James on April 19, 2007 1:26 PM, which could have been a "copy & paste" job out of a standard American history book and doesn't reflect the truth.
The present US-American administration proves James being wrong on an almost daily basis.
Posted by: Heribert Schindler | April 20, 2007 1:01 AM
Heribert,
I can only say that the response from some Americans to harsh criticism from Germans, especially left-wing Germans, is (on the left) to say that we deserve it, and on the right, to attribute it to long-buried resentments against the "Amis". There is a whole website called David's MedienKritik dedicated to this thesis - and they had a field day with a recent German managazine cartoon that called American outsourcing companies "bloodsuckers", pointing to the frequent use of this phrase in the 1930s. On the other side of the Pond among "Anglo-Saxons", the British Euroskeptics point to some of former Chancellor Kohl's bombastic statements in the name of "Europe" as rechannelling German nationalism in an acceptable way.
I do not think Europeans understand the extent to which euroskepticism is ingrained in America, not in the British sense of that word (i.e. an intellectual and emotional case against the European Union and Britain's membership in the E.U.) but in two other senses.
The first is "we bailed them out twice and all they do is complain about us" - the "Freedom Fries" euroskepticism. However, there were huge tensions during the Vietnam War and even during the Carter years before "that cowboy" Ronald Reagan took office. I have a copy of a cartoon depicting De Gaulle in the early 1960s saying, "Why do you Americans linger where you are not wanted?" showing the Frenchman standing in a sea of white crosses in Normandy.
The second, and far more shocking form of euroskepticism to some European ears, is simply writing Europe as we know it off - i.e. the arguments that "those decadent Europeans aren't even having children anymore" and "they're all just going to become Islamic republics in thirty years anyway". Basically, the argument is that European objections to American foreign policy are all rooted either in old envious resentment or dhimmitude.
My main point is: the Economist's Micklewait and Woolridge are right. Europeans cannot simply pin all of this on "George Bush's America" and expect all these transatlantic tensions to all go away in 2008. That would be pretending that there was no talk of "eurowimps" who didn't have the stomach for bombing the Serbs in the 1990s, or that Clinton never talked about Iraqi WMD and Richard Clarke never implied a connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.
The notion that Clinton was more euro-friendly, along with the media not wanting to compare Bush's statements to his predecessor's, has created a lot of convenient amnesia. In the context of Russia, you could compare it to failing to examine Putin's actions in comparison with Yeltsin's, including Yeltsin shelling the Communist-dominated parliament that tried to impeach him.
Posted by: Charles Ganske | April 20, 2007 7:43 AM
Heribert, Luther,
EXHIBIT A: Only one month ago, in Chicago, a massive anti-war demonstration was held without conflict with local police or authorities in the most visible location in all the city, North Michigan Ave. It made front-page news in the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times and was heavily covered by all the independent (as in, not state-owned) television stations. No leading participants, whether Muslim, Communist, Chavista, Russophile or otherwise, were taken in by state security services.
EXHIBIT B: Less than one week ago, in Moscow and St. Petersberg, small, non-threatening groups of peaceful demonstrators were prohibited from peacefully taking their grievances to the prime locations for the public's attention. An overwhelmingly and illogically large police force used brutal force against women, children, the elderly, and even press members. Though it's not like any of the major (state-owned) press outlets gave any real attention to it in the first place.
EXHIBIT A: An open and democratic society. A society that does everything right? Of course not. Only God gets everything right. But a society where dissent and questioning are not only permitted, but in many circumstances, even encouraged.
EXHIBIT B: The opposite.
Posted by: James | April 20, 2007 9:42 AM
Well, we left the path of "who won WW II" and are now on the topic "Why do Euros and Yanks don't like eachother". This topic is fine with me as well.
By closing the initial topic I guess we seem to agree that the USA didn't win "that war" all by themselves and that there is no whatsoever reason to have a "super-ego". The USA aren't any better or worse than any other nation on this planet.
On the present situation here, in Germany that is, I think quite a few people are fed up with the attitude Americans show towards Germans. WW II is a part of history and nothing is as boring as yesterday's news.
Present day Germans are not responsible for the mistakes of their grandfathers, present day Americans can't claim the merits of theirs.
All this ranting about "old Europe" and "new Europe" is a relict of the Cold War (which is over as well and hasn't been won by either side, although Americans handed out "Cold War Victory Medals"), a relict which is artificially kept alive by those who haven't reached the 21st century yet.
Europe is trying to find a common future and particularly DeGaulle and Adenauer were the founding fathers of this idea. France and Germany have been the "motor" of the European idea while the British (as you've pointed out correctly) are those who oppose this idea the most. In my humble opinion the British have acted, since the end of WW II, more like the 51st State of the USA than like an independant European country. If the British should like to either be incorporated into the USA, or either become USS Great Britain, that's fine with me. I am neither suggesting to bomb them or whatever for not wanting to be Europeans. It's entirely their decision.
On the other hand I see quite a few European countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain, just to name a few, which have picked up the European idea. More and more countries are picking up this idea and, slowly but surely, Europe moves towards the "Commonwealth of Independant European States".
The idea of a "European Defence and Security Community" is already present as many see NATO to be obsolete and, in clear terms, don't want to be part of a treaty organisation wich is dominated by the USA and treated like "The American Foreign Legion", obliged to provide troops and equipment to Ameica's wars but has little to no say in the decision when and where to go to war.
Europe's future is in the East. And Europe will have only reached the "goal" when Russia is fully incorporated in Europe.
This is why Russia definitely has to become a member of the EU and Europe has to look for a political and military alliance with Russia.
Of course, this is not to the liking and doesn't meet the ideas of the USA who want to "terraform" Europe to their liking. This is why the USA constantly try to dirve a wedge into Europe, be it this "missile defence shield" or the dictate to have Turkey join the EU.
Also the "feeding" of the nationalism in e.g. Poland and Estonia, intended to provoke Russia wherever possible and hoping to provoke an exaggerated Russian reaction, is a clear indicator of USAnian plans in Europe.
I think Americans and Europeans should shake hands and part as friends. The 20th century was the "American Century", the 21st century is the "EurAsian Century". Europe is better off with Russia and China (BRIC) than it is with the present day America as America isn't looking for friends or allies but for vassals.
Bush's parole is "either you are with us or you're against us". Well, if Europe is forced to decide in such a way then I opt for the "against us" option.
I strongly reject the presence of American military bases and military personnel in Europe. I'd prefer to see the Americans leave Germany rather today than tomorrow. And I hope to see as many European countries as possible to refuse granting military bases and installations to the USA.
NATO has to be disbanded, not extended. I highly appreciate that the Ukrainians reject the idea of joining NATO. Ukraine will get over the internal problems with the help of the EU and without the constant interference of the USA (e.g. the funding of the "orange whackos" out of the CIA budget).
Europe said "Good Bye, Lenin" already. Now it's time to say "Good Bye, Uncle Sam".
In the end, I am not advocating a "hostile environment", I suggest Europe and America to part as friends. But it's America to decide.
Posted by: Heribert Schindler | April 20, 2007 11:14 AM
Dear Heribert,
Good stuff on your last post… too damn long for me to respond as my work needs attention…
Dear James,
Who paid for the protests in Chicago? Or Martin Luther King's protests for that matter?
You want to see America pissed off? Let’s see what happens if a foreign gov starts paying for protests in America. I don’t like the idea, but since we have a gov based on Darwinism, bring it on, let’s see what happens.
I welcome all the protests in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, so long as they are organized and paid for by internal interests... and it happens, and it's good, and people protest, and change happens (with no gain or loss to the US) because of something they believe in, not some think tank in Wash DC who is obsessed with reaching over to Belarus or Russia and controlling their countries for the very subsidy of America..
External financing of protests works no place. It’s like having the fox guard then hen house… or Bush sharing an opinion on the success of Iraq.
Boy... oil is going to get mighty close to $100 / brl this summer... I would like to see your posts as Chavez starts taking that oil windfall money and starts bounding and drilling and paying for protests in NYC or Chicago or DC... see what kind of opinion you have then.
It's going to be a real bitch when we are treated like we treat others.
Posted by: Luther G. Quick | April 20, 2007 3:11 PM
I think LGQ lies when he says he was a once a steadfast Republican; no Republican, even an ex-one, would take such glee in America's impending trainwreck. He might not even be an American. Nonetheless, whoever he is, he's right. This country is going to be fighting for its life, and it will be fighting alone.
Posted by: armchair pessimist | April 20, 2007 3:39 PM
Charles/Yuri,
Please disregard and delete my previous comment I have submitted. I misread what Heribert was saying.
Thanks.
Posted by: Tim Newman | April 20, 2007 5:21 PM
Luther, on the matter of Chavez, he and Fidel are already funding propaganda in the United States. Chavez has been selling fuel oil at cut-rate prices to American poor, and Fidel has allowed Michael Moore to film a documentary where 9/11 victims in poor health are treated in Cuban clinics (no, not the roach-infested health hazards where common Cubans are forced to seek treatment. These are just the couple nice clinics that he has to keep up as a front for foreign touristas).
As for the matter of protests being "organized and paid for by internal interests." HOW?
Allow me to lift a passage from Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom," Chapter 1:
"In a capitalist society, it is only necessary to convince a few wealthy people to get funds to launch an idea, however strange, and there are many such persons, many independent foci of support... The competitive publisher, for example, cannot afford to publish only writing with which he agrees; his touchstone must be the likelihood that the market will be large enough to yield a satisfactory return on his investment...
Let us stretch our imagination and suppose that a socialist government is aware of this problem and is composed of people anxious to preserve freedom. Could it provide the funds? Perhaps, but it is difficult to see how. It could establish a bureau for subsidizing propaganda. But how could it choose whom to support? If it gave to all who asked, it would shortly find itself out of funds, for socialism cannot repeal the elementary economic law that a sufficiently high price will call forth a large supply. Make the advocacy of radical causes sufficiently remunerative, and the supply of advocates will be unlimited."
Now, in outright Socialist countries like Belarus or a sham capitalist state like Russia, where businessmen who fund opposition are guaranteed to find themselves unlicensed to do business, in unexpected tax arrears, and eventually jailed, where the Hell are these "internal interests" supposed to come up with support? If Americans are supposed to foot the bill for everyone else's problems, from tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes we didn't cause to AIDS epidemics which people keep bringing on themselves, why shouldn't one group of human beings assist another, disadvantaged group of human beings transform their government from economically ineffective ravagers of human rights to legally limited and controlled administrators dedicated to ensuring personal liberty instead of some vague concept of national (more specifically, the autocrat's) glory?
Posted by: James | April 20, 2007 7:22 PM
I believe we all agree on one chief point, that the Nazi Germany was defeated due to the efforts of ALL nations allied against it. How much was contributed by whom, and the impact of these contributions – well, we can argue about that endlessly. It’s all speculation and opinions.
My roots are from Stalingrad, now Volgograd. If anyone ever visits that city, you must go to the memorial on Mamayev Kurgan, a high point that was viciously fought for in the great battle due to the strategic advantage it offered. It was lost and recaptured many times by both sides, and many a soldier, both Soviet and German, had laid their head to rest there…
My great-grandparents and grandparents told me a lot of stories, the horrors of war we cannot even conceive of. Sometimes I am literally brought to tears just thinking about the amount of death and misery that came to so many people. Each one of them was an individual just like us, with their hopes and dreams, families and friends, hopes and aspirations… And then the senseless war had claimed tens of millions of lives, at the whim of a few madmen…
I do not dispute the efforts and help provided by USA and Britain in this war. It only grieves me that no mention of Soviet effort is ever made, and D-day is touted as the turning point of the war, and Americans as the sole liberators of Europe. It’s not right for one country to claim all credit just like that, even if it’s to nurture national pride and patriotism amongst the young and clueless.
As far as the events of post-war, well, much of it is speculation. Churchill actually had a plan to re-arm the surrendered German army and have them and allies attack Soviet Union. However, Roosevelt did not want to back him up, and it came to nothing. Truman played with the idea, however, but wanted a massive nuclear strike to be the major hit, followed by ground invasion. A plan was drafted to bomb 30 major cities in Soviet Union, then 100, for the strike to be effective. However, making a bomb was a slow process back then, and such number of bombs could not be made quickly. Then shortly thereafter Soviets had successfully tested their own nuclear bomb, and the plan was aborted as USA no longer had the upper hand, and a retaliatory strike would have been imminent. Instead, the nuclear arms race followed, and the Cold War.
As for Stalin, I seriously doubt he was planning an attack on Europe, because of the extreme depletion of human resources. There was extreme labor shortage in Russia due to this unprecedented loss of life. What the army had was all it was going to have, there was no one to recruit. Young boys don’t grow on trees, and they live only once… Too many had died. Way too many. So, like in Korean war, the Chinese did the dying, Soviets provided training, weapons and intelligence. They could not afford to provide people.
Before war, to be exiled to Siberia or killed as a “vrag naroda”, that is, “enemy of the people”, you only needed one phone call or letter from a member of the communist party bearing false witness against you, and you’d be gone the next day, no questions asked. After the war it took signatures of 3 members of the party in a testimony against someone for them to be labeled the enemy, because Stalin could ill-afford to purge the population in the same proportions as he’d done before. A sad chapter in Russia’s history, that’s for sure…
P.S. If Providence was to grant me but one wish, I would not ask for money or fame – no, no. I’d ask to go back in time and strangle Uncle Joseph with my bare hands, before this Georgian maggot set out on his murderous campaign to obliterate Russian nation from the face of the Earth.
Posted by: Al Goroh | April 21, 2007 2:13 AM
Charles Ganske:
It is indeed interesting to think about what might have happened had Hitler not turned on Stalin -- or been smarter when he did.
The German embassy in Moscow did their damndest, from the time Hitler came to power until the very eve of Operation Barbarossa, to persuade him against a war with the Soviet Union.
The German ambassador in the years leading up to the attack, Werner von der Schulenberg, was a determined proponent of what was called the strategy of the 'continental bloc'. Essentially, this involved adding the Soviet Union to the Anti-Comintern Pact of Germany, Japan and Italy.
Central to the reasoning behind Schulenberg's project was the argument that Stalin was turning from an international to a national socialist.
Who knows? Had Schulenberg's strategy been adopted, the twentieth century might have become the German century.
When Hitler attacked, he turned his view of a struggle to the death between Germany and the Soviet Union into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The German diplomats switched to trying to get him to fight the war in the rather smart way in which the Germans had fought in 1914-17: that is, making maximum use of the internal tensions in the Russian imperial system.
Who knows -- had Schulenberg and his colleagues been listened to, the Germans might have won again. But Hitler's commitment to creating a slave empire made this impossible.
Schulenberg himself was one of the 20th July 1944 plotters' candidates for foreign minister in a post-Hitler government, and was executed after its failure.
A fascinating memoir of inter-war German-Soviet relations by the long-serving embassy counsellor, Gustav Hilger, entitled Incompatible Allies, was published in English in 1953.
In general, Cold War scholars appear not to read it. An exception is Christopher Simpson, whose pathbreaking 1988 study Blowback deals with the exploitation by the Americans and British after 1945 of Germans and German collaborators who had been involved in the war in the East.
Very helpfully, he points to the close relationships which had been forged between the German diplomats and their American colleagues Charles Bohlen and George Kennan in the pre-war period.
Unfortunately, Simpson cannot get away from the presumption that almost all Germans involved in the war in the East must necessarily have been Russophobic anti-Semites. This is slightly bizarre in Hilger's case. Not only was he patently a Russophile; the scholar he chose as co-author of his memoir, Alfred G. Meyer, was a German Jewish emigre to the United States, both of whose parents had died in the Holocaust, and whose brother was survivor of the Buchenwald death march.
To add to the ironies, another major recent study debunking the Icebreaker thesis is Grand Delusion by the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky. In large measure, this is a restatement of the fundamentals of the German Moscow Embassy view of Stalin.
Had Simpson been more open-minded, he might have noted a strange puzzle. It is widely believed that Kennan, generally seen as the architect of 'containment', argued that Stalin was hell-bent on communising the world. It is then more than a little odd that, in his memoirs, Kennan describes the German Moscow Embassy as having been 'at all times excellent'. For the view that the Soviets were hell-bent on communising the world was one that his erstwhile German colleagues had thought might have been well-warranted back in the Twenties, but was well out of date by the late Thirties.
(I accidentally posted my comment before finishing correcting it, so I am reposting. Please ignore previous version!)
Posted by: David Habakkuk | April 21, 2007 6:07 AM
Hi Herbert,
"As to the American contribution to the war effort, it's hard to determine why America got engaged in WWII."
May I suggest and idea thats in the M&A news a lot? Dominance.
Maybe the US didn't like the idea of competition from a 'united europe' which would have very powerful economic muscle in comparison to a collection of 'have been' empires?
After all, the US sat it out until they were directly attacked and Roosevelt had to hide his real beliefs from the voting public, not to mention advanced warning of Pearl Harbor.
Hitler's germany certainly had plenty of powerful fans in the US too from Lindbergh to Joseph Kennedy, though not to ignore that this was also true in europe.
The US had pressured european states to diminish the Versailles reparations, Kellog-Briand pact etc. If this hadn't have happened, I wonder how history would have been different.
Also, the US had a couple of years to look, watch and listen, time to reflect.
Though taking part may well have meant the prologation of the conflict (look what happened to Serbia after the '41 coup) and much greater death and destruction, US influences would utimately be stronger.
Also, you shouldn't underestimate the human angle of not wanting morally to trade with a unified europe under the nazi regime.
It makes me think a bit about Robert Harris' (?) book 'Fatherland'...
I think it was already apparent to the diplomats and others that the gloss had already long started to come off.
I think that the sheer abhorence of the nazi regime as exposed really made it a no brainer for the 'US'. The 'nice' devil you know maybe...
Under the 'for democracy and freedom' slogan goes, there's the whole realpolitik. Do you want to? Are you in a position to? If you can, how do you? etc. etc.
Posted by: Aleks | April 21, 2007 10:34 AM
I just wanted to comment that in New York at least anti-war protectors (and not just - any protest against the status quo or even the Critical Mass monthly bike rally) have been beaten, forcibly removed, or arrested, and basically none of this has been mentioned in the national or local news.
Just in response to what was written above about Chicago vs. Russia.
Posted by: james b. | April 21, 2007 2:09 PM
James: "in New York at least anti-war protectors (and not just - any protest against the status quo or even the Critical Mass monthly bike rally) have been beaten, forcibly removed, or arrested, and basically none of this has been mentioned in the national or local news."
Yes, you're right. See, for example, NYC Republican National Convention, 2004: 1,800 arrested, dozens beaten, hundreds of bikes impounded.
Posted by: The Deleted Scenes | April 21, 2007 3:29 PM
Tim,
Easy there - for a moment I thought you were going to pull out that English football slogan on Heribert Schindler,"Two World Wars and One World Cup!" :)
Per your request, I deleted your previous comment.
Posted by: Charles Ganske | April 21, 2007 3:35 PM
Hey Armchair pessimist,
Why is it you claim I have such "glee in America's impending trainwreck"
What am I to do?
If you and I were in an Enron board meeting, and the GROUP, the BREWHAHA, where most were just agreeing with president Lay. If I said "excuse me, but sh!ts about to fly" or "excuse me, our company is about to collapse"...
So how is it we are to tell a bunch of YES MEN, bad news? Hitler and Stalin executed people who delivered bad news... Kenneth Lay fired them, Bush fired a pile of people including prosecutors because they don't agree.
Honestly, I'm just a republican who is deathly afraid that the US is going to bleed big time... The perfect storm if you will...
So, evidently, I need to agree with my fellow republicans, agree that everything ok... just like a round table at the Whitehouse yapping about wmd or who did 9/11... if you were a copilot Armchair pessimist, and the jet was pointed down, make sure you don't hurt the pilot's feelings, and take that throttle and push it all the way forward.
Feeling, that's America today, screw reality...
I mean all these DC republicans thinking that if you say "all is well" enough times, that eventually is becomes so, right?
So who is the patriot? The guys that whispers that trouble is ahead, or the ones that claim all is well, or the guys that are screaming with sarcasm and insults to try to wake people up?
Good grief, Putin is more of a republican than any leader today in DC, but for Russia. The US is oh so very screwed... This is a brewhaha, and everyone is drunk on their asses, and beer (oil) is running out... The yes men will have a very bad morning when they wake up. And who they going to blame?
Yes, everything is just dandy... not that I'm worried, I have my rear end covered.
pass me another beer... And I solute to cheap energy, to the hanging of Saddam for 911, and the massive oasis of success in Iraq. Gee, lets all cash in our home equity and buy more beer...
Posted by: Luther G. Quick | April 21, 2007 3:48 PM
James,
You ain't seen real interference in the US election system YET... Even when the Chinese gave Bill Clinton $100,000 people got upset...
But oil will go very high and the dollar will go down, from this you will see more interference over the years to come...
A little fuel oil from Chavez is nothing...
And James, be honest, Belarus, socialist? Maybe on strategic areas, but private business are growing faster than the US, with far lower taxes. Labor laws are very capitalist in Belarus compared to the US or Germany. As for Russians and there capitalism, wake up man, the reason why you call it a sham is because America can't acquire it for FREE. Why is it that when America can't get a free ride we call someone else a sham?
As for the US paying to take care of the world? Get real... it's an accounting entry as the US is pumping the most liquidity in the world which will eventually bite her in the ass... More finished goods flow into America than OUT... More energy goes to America than out... More services are sold to America than she sells... look at US debt as such an indicator...
anyway... we will see... the stats are proving your argument wrong...
Posted by: Luther G. Quick | April 21, 2007 3:59 PM
Luther,
I'm never exactly sure what argument you're addressing. Have I raised the issue of Russia's economic success vs. America's or the rest of the world's? I think you assume that I'm a consequentialist libertarian when I'm much more likely to skew towards natural rights. In other words, I care more about human rights than GDP's, though I do believe them to be fundamentally linked (per Friedman, von Mises, Hayek, etc.) I have no doubt that a brutal autocracy sitting on a f***load of oil can manage quite well to give us a lot of trouble. My only consolation is that as Russia follows Venezuela's energy model, she'll inevitably share Venezuela's failures (inept politicized management leading to significant drop-offs in production).
But back to my actual subject and not the subjects to which you keep trying to skew the discussion, I'm not sure what stats there are to prove me wrong that basic human rights and due process are toilet paper in Belarus/Russia. Both countries have governments that are capable of operating with no limitation, no examination, no due process. What it breaks down to is that their governments can do whatever the hell they want, when they want, how they want. Capitalism cannot function where there is no rule of law and protection of human rights. You might be able to make a big bag of money in the short-term, but in the long haul the system collapses.
Don't get me wrong, there are abuses in the United States, too. I was hopping mad at Kelo. But at least in the United States I can read about problems in the newspaper and see it on the 9:00 PM news. In America, our abusive policemen get fired. In Belarus/Russia, they can be outright murderers and still get practically sainted.
Posted by: James | April 21, 2007 7:01 PM
Tim Newman | April 20, 2007 5:21 PM
Please disregard and delete my previous comment I have submitted. I misread what Heribert was saying.
Still, I would like to read your comment. Maybe you would like to send it via e-mail ?
Charles Ganske | April 21, 2007 3:35 PM
Tim, Easy there - for a moment I thought you were going to pull out that English football slogan on Heribert Schindler,"Two World Wars and One World Cup!" :)
Tim and I disagree in our views on the USA. I think to have understood Tim being steadfastly pro USA, which I am not. (I'd like to point out that I am not "Anti-USA" or "Americophobic", I am rather against any US interference in Europe.)
Although Tim and I have differing views, I do not consider him being a nationalist with the intention to bash or insult Europe in general and Germany in particular. I am sorry he retracted his comment.
Posted by: Heribert Schindler | April 22, 2007 2:47 AM
"As to the American contribution to the war effort, it's hard to determine why America got engaged in WWII."
...
Maybe the US didn't like the idea of competition from a 'united europe' which would have very powerful economic muscle in comparison to a collection of 'have been' empires?
I'd estimate that the number of Americans worried about a 'united Europe' in 1939-1942 would have been about 0.
Posted by: Tim Newman | April 22, 2007 4:40 AM
Luther Q:
You and I look at the x-ray of the USA and see the same bad news. You seem to enjoy what you're seeing, and I don't. But whoever you are, and whatever your motives, you are, unfortunately, absolutely correct in your diagnosis.
Posted by: armchair pessimist | April 22, 2007 8:11 AM
I'd estimate that the number of Americans worried about a 'united Europe' in 1939-1942 would have been about 0
Well, I'd estimate that this hasn't been the fist time you've erred.
But hey, we are all just humans. Errare humanum est. ;-)
Posted by: Heribert Schindler | April 22, 2007 8:50 AM
James,
You are living in the past with your rantings...
Russia isn't the old USSR that had gulags and concentration camps...
And today's US isn't yesterdays with segregation, witch huntings, scalping of the American Indians, hangings of the blacks. Although we still burn black churches down, I'm sure the PNAC will say it's for "democracy".
Regardless, today's world is more dynamic... things in the past took forever to change... Like the various states of matter - solid, liquid, gas or plasma... Today's world of geopolitics and economics looks more like plasma where things change rapidly and viciously. And so fast, that many people are stuck in the past, making judgments and investment decisions using old data.
I have seen more positive changes in Belarus and Russia than in any time in the US. And in truth, there has been great negative changes in the US.
Time will tell. But your perception of Russia is back from the "solid" era. Not your country nor your competitors have remained in that slow state, only your perceptions and your relative judgment staying in such a slow state... In terms of sheer volume and gross dollars, there is far more corruption in the US than in Russia. And in order to see this, you need to move your head out of the solid state unless it's already solidified perminatly.
Posted by: Luther G. Quick | April 22, 2007 11:07 AM
Dear Armchair pessimist,
Enjoy?, !(^%*#$% !!!
I don't enjoy this sad future for America...
I'm like an ex-smoker. I once believed in all this American hegemony... no more. Ex smokers tend to be more vocal about second hand smoke, about advising others to quit and change as they know the details personally... and I am more vocal about US imperialism because I believed in the delusion 20 years ago.
Years ago I would hang with fellow conservatives, car polling to watch personally Bush SR make a speech in Trenton, NJ or driving around and watching a NJ governor candidate (who later did some PR for my business) make speeches or paying a donation, dressed in a tuxedo to watch Jeane Kirkpatrick yap about how America will SAVE the world.
What a waste of money, networking and being a conservative groupie...
There is simply no progressive way of delivering bad news, and it's frustrating for a true American to let go when all logic says the US can't survive "peak oil" or the massive debt, or Iraq failures, lost manufacturing base, or the lost opportunities with emerging democracies such as Russia or other BRIC members...
it's like visiting a relative on their death bed... eventually, all the hoses, pipes, morphine, pumps and tubes will not do anything. it's over and you go on with the next phase...
To this, I love debating on the Internet about these issues... I learn so much while I hope someone will prove that my worries are wrong about the US... This has yet to happen.
Few people and few nations change unless there is a catastrophe.
The only happiness and glee I have is that other nations will do well... not at the expense of the US, but at the profit of their own work and dedication - like Ragan believed. Reaganomics is all over the world, except America. Globalization is more important not (just) for profit but for the sake of taking care of your family and future.
Today, it is better to be a patriot for democracy than to be a patriot of any one county, you simply can't focus on one nation anymore. You must cheery pick those that have a future.
America is left with a very low probability of success. But we will see.
Posted by: Luther G. Quick | April 22, 2007 12:30 PM
I'm still trying to figure out Aleks' post and his "united europe" hypothesis. Does he actually assert that the US leaders feared that the economic power of a Europe united under the Nazis? (who I suppose would be expected to bring on a wirtschaftswunder thereafter to rival the US?)
Considering that he recognizes Pearl Harbor (albeit with the unproven theory that FDR had advance warning), wouldn't that make the above reasons moot- or does he believe that Pearl Harbor alone would not have been enough to engage the US, absent our economic self-interest vis-a-vis a United Nazi Europe?
If any of this economic rationale were true, it seems to me that but for Pearl Harbor, the US would have preferred a much later entry into the war, considering the rather shoddy state of our military at that time. I guess "watch[ing] and listen[ing], time to reflect" must not have included upgrading our own military for the contingency of war.
Posted by: Steve | April 22, 2007 1:46 PM
Heribert,
I'm sorry I misspelled your name. PEBE&F (Problem Exists Between Eyeballs & Fingers).
Posted by: Aleks | April 22, 2007 4:05 PM
Well, I'd estimate that this hasn't been the fist time you've erred.
Based on previous discussions with you regarding European modern history, it comes as little surprise that you believe a 'united Europe' was a threat to the US in 1939-1942.
But to those of us who take the subject matter seriously enough to warrant the consultation of a history book, it is abundantly clear that Europe was tearing itself apart in an almighty war during the period in question.
Posted by: Tim Newman | April 22, 2007 4:45 PM
The Pearl Harbor theory stuff is akin to the second guessing that surrounded the intelligence preceding 9/11. Were there warnings of an attack using hijacked planes as missiles? Yep, but these were surrounded by so many other warnings that only with the benefit of hindsight does it seem "clear".
In the case of Pearl Harbor, FDR had warnings of Japanese attacks all over the Pacific, including Pearl, but the Phillipines seemed to be the most logical target. McArthur and other commanders were pleading for reinforcement, but most of the materiel was going to the Atlantic (even though the Pacific was twice as big) - the movie Pearl Harbor, whatever you think of Jerry Bruckheimer, actually did a good job of sympathetically portraying the U.S. Navy commander's dilemma. At the time, even if Adm. Kimmel had been warned, he had only a fraction of the combat power the Japanese Navy, with the Allies breaking of the Japanese codes as his only equalizer. The victory at Midway was nothing less than a minor miracle.
Posted by: Charles Ganske | April 22, 2007 5:54 PM
Tim: Based on previous discussions with you regarding European modern history, it comes as little surprise that you believe a 'united Europe' was a threat to the US in 1939-1942.
"United" could have meant:
united under Nazi rule with a friendly German-Soviet relationship.
Ok, I admit I should have been more precise as the attack on the SU took place in 1941 and I should have underlined my idea more obviously.
Tim: But to those of us who take the subject matter seriously enough to warrant the consultation of a history book, it is abundantly clear that Europe was tearing itself apart in an almighty war during the period in question.
Tim, there was a war in Europe ? REALLY ?
What is a "book" ? ;-)
Posted by: Heribert Schindler | April 23, 2007 12:00 AM
Aleks, don't worry about misspelling my name. This happens most of the time and doesn't bother me at all.
Posted by: Heribert Schindler | April 23, 2007 12:06 AM
"United" could have meant...united under Nazi rule with a friendly German-Soviet relationship.
So you think a Nazi rule across of Europe is synonymous with a united Europe?! The French, British, Danish, Dutch, Balts, Polish, Belgians, and Norwegians may have begged to differ.
But let's suppose this is the case, and America was afraid of the economic power of a 'united' Europe, by any definition. You stated that I was making an error in estimating the number of Americans to fear this as being 0. Can you therefore quote any prominent American of the era who voiced his or her concern about the economic threat of a 'united' Europe? If not, can we assume that you stating I made an error was based on nothing which could be described as historical fact?
In addition, it would seem odd that the US would fear the economic power of a 'united' Europe at a time when most of the continent was at war, yet wholeheartedly supported and continues to support the European economic union in its various forms in the peace since WWII. Perhaps you can explain this discrepancy?
Posted by: Tim Newman | April 23, 2007 4:22 AM
Dear Tim,
in totalitarian regimes or empires many of those who are occupied "beg to differ", yet they usually have little success in doing so.
Your initial statement on April 22, 2007 4:40 AM was:
I'd estimate that the number of Americans worried about a 'united Europe' in 1939-1942 would have been about 0.
Can you therefore quote any (prominent or not) American of the era who voiced his or her opinion about not being worried by (the economic or whatever) threat of a 'united' Europe? Only one among the millions of Americans of that era ?
Tim, you were tossing around a generalisation. Me doing the same is met by your demand "Can you therefore quote any prominent American of the era who voiced his or her concern about the economic threat of a 'united' Europe? ".
The probability of me finding a single person being worried is much more higher than the probability for you being able to prove that not a single person among the millions of Americans at that time was worried.
We may agree that both of our statements were crappy, but you were the first of us to come up with such a generalisation and you are the one who then askes for evidence without providing it yourself. We both were "estimating", not "proving".
Is this what you call a resonable stile of debating ?
Posted by: Heribert Schindler | April 23, 2007 11:30 PM
Tim Newman/Heribert Schindler
If Americans were not worried by a 'united Europe' between the fall of France and the attack on the Soviet Union, they certainly should have been.
As I pointed out in my earlier comment, there was a perfectly good alternative strategy for Hitler -- that of the 'continental bloc' of Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union, which was advocated by the German Ambassador in Moscow, Schulenberg.
This was actually not very far from the nightmare of the American strategist Brooks Adams, who at the turn of the century had worried about a German-Russian alliance, with Germany in the driving sea. This he thought could come to control the resources and potential markets of China, and consolidate Eurasia as an autarkic economic system, from which the United States would be excluded.
This, Adams had thought, might have fatal consequences for the American economic and political system.
In another fascinating set of memoirs by a former German Moscow Embassy diplomat, Hans von Herwarth suggests that had Hitler and Stalin met personally, they might have got on like a house on fire. The Wehrmacht and the Red Army might then have joined forces against the British.
The judgement is echoed in the memoirs of the American diplomat Charles Bohlen. He and Herwarth may have been wrong -- Stalin appears to have been unenthusiastic about the notion of being diverted away from the Balkans by the promise of spoils from looting the British. But he could quite possibly have been blackmailed into it.
It has become common to see some kind of natural historical logic leading to the triumph of liberal democracy. In fact, there is a strong case to be made for seeing this as largely a matter of fluke.
In 1940 democracy was widely regarded as a discredited system -- an impression that the military failures of Britain and France did little to counter. Had Hitler not attacked the Soviet Union, it is unclear that the German position could have been successfully challenged.
The Wehrmacht was an enormously formidable military machine. The most important of British WWII military intelligence officers, Kenneth Strong, who became Eisenhower's G2, used to say that it took three British battalions to equal one German. But blitzkrieg worked best on the metalled roads of Europe. Hitler chose to send the Wehrmacht to fight the one war where dramatic successes were always liable to be inadequate to force victory, consigning Germany to a war of attrition where the cards were stacked against it.
Posted by: David Habakkuk | April 24, 2007 5:17 AM
in totalitarian regimes or empires many of those who are occupied "beg to differ", yet they usually have little success in doing so.
Erm, no. There is a huge difference between a number of territories being forcibly occupied and a number of territories being united, the difference being the extent to which the inhabitants of said territories accept the occupation. That the citizens occupied by the Nazis could not do much about their situation does not make their territories united in any meaningful sense of the word, except perhaps in their opposition to the occupiers.
Can you therefore quote any (prominent or not) American of the era who voiced his or her opinion about not being worried by (the economic or whatever) threat of a 'united' Europe? Only one among the millions of Americans of that era ?
Oh, I see you have shifted the goalposts to expand the threat from a 'united' Europe from being one of economics to include any kind of threat. Allow me to refocus the debate on the original claim, which was that the US was worried about the economic threat posed by a 'united' Europe?
Nw, you have shifted the burden of proof in an unacceptable manner by asking me to prove the negative. I can no more provide you with a prominent politician who stated they were not worried about the ecnomic threat posed by a 'united' Europe than I can provide you with a prominent politician who stated they were not worried about an alien invasion. That I cannot does not constitute proof that Americans were worried about a Martian attack.
We are arguing here over the existence of an American worry of the economic threat of a 'united' Europe. You say it existed, I'm saying it didn't. The onus is on you to prove that it did, not for me to prove that it didn't. So far, you have failed to do so.
Posted by: Tim Newman | April 24, 2007 2:08 PM
If Americans were not worried by a 'united Europe' between the fall of France and the attack on the Soviet Union, they certainly should have been.
Let's be clear here. I am not saying that Americans weren't worried about a 'united' Europe; I am saying that they were not worried about the economic threat of a 'united' Europe in the period 1939-1942.
America was clearly afraid of the military and security threat posed by the Nazis, even in a Europe which was still at war; and some were certainly afraid of the military threat posed by a potential Nazi/Soviet domination of Europe.
Posted by: Tim Newman | April 24, 2007 9:19 PM
Tim, let me ask the unacceptable question about the present weather conditions in Sakhalin ? ;-)
Posted by: Heribert Schindler | April 24, 2007 11:09 PM
In Khrushchev's secret speech to the 20th Congress (see link below), he has a lot to say about Stalin's mismangement of the war. Does anyone know how much of this should be believed and how much should be taken with a grain of salt? Was Khrushchev's plan of de-Stalinization implemented for his own benefit or was it truely because he believe Stalin was bad for the USSR?
http://www.uwm.edu/Course/448-343/index12.html
Thanks Tim for the effort. It is greatly appreciated to have a few people, who don't have an ax to grind, posting on this blog.
Posted by: Jason H | April 26, 2007 3:49 PM
A few thoughts.
What a pity! Americans and Europeans are still talking past one another after several decades now, and it seem's like Luther is egging it on! What axe does he have too grind?
Actually, i like Europeans, seeing that i think we have more common ground than they would care too admit!
Sometimes it seems pointless to have a debate when the superiority complex comes into play. So why should i really bother in sharing my views!
Posted by: Panther | May 3, 2007 12:37 PM
Hey Panther,
Please, share your views... Somebody out there will correct me someday and point out how great US policy has done for the world, because either my glasses are dirty but I can't see it... So your opinion Panther matters...
You know, America is a special place of diversity and equal opportunity, only in America can someone as dumb and retarded as Bush become president. Only can such criminals such as Paul Wolfowitz excel and be promoted for such acts, and I could list 1000's more with far more impact in scandal and incompetence... Got to admit, opportunity for all... The reason, is that accountability is not applied anymore in America.
You see, America goes into so many countries, screws up so much, and claims "we meant well", and she isn't accountable.
I have no axe to grind, but in the civilian world, in America, leaders of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and others are forced to pay for their failed "good intensions".
And my gripe is US foreign policy, it is childish, it has kept Ukraine in the abyss, it will keep Georgia in a black hole as "Yankee Know how" gets in there tries to bring Iraqi methodologies to the CIS.
But Panther, you are correct, Americans and even Europeans live in the past, worried about Russia's power... Never mind that is was Germany frying people in gas chambers and ovens, never mind the Japan was slaughtering / raping woman and children all over Asia around WW2. Yes, America is worried about missile, and Iran and Russia are the bad guys, forget that the Nazi's were making lampshades out of Jew's skin, forget that Arlington National cemetery is full of WW2 dead by Japanese kamikaze...
...yup, let's use Nato and surround Russia and take over the middle east...
correct me if I'm wrong, but Bush must have a brain tumor, and Dr.Rice is an expert on Russia? Then Jeffery Dahmer would have made a great butcher.
Western thought is that Russia will be evil, maybe Germany and Japan worry because they assume Russia will act like they did 60 years ago.
These psychotic nut cases in Nato sleep with one eye open, from the US president to those brilliant engineers managing such advanced success in Iraq.
Nope, sorry, but I'm not egging anyone on, I simply don't trust Nato or Western intensions, track records keep getting in the way. Like any VC investor, successful investors use history and apply due diligence in their analysis to judge and deicide who is "full of it" and who has credibility. Nobody want words, not on an aircraft carrier declaring major operations over and not some silly new buzz word such as "shock and awe", "surge", or "colored revolution". Little subtle events like Paul Wolfowitz's corruption or the lying behind Pat Tillman's death, these are all symbols of how America fails internally and how she spreads this failure, with no accountability to the entire world.
So Panther, this entire Western THRUST in both media and politics, to me, is about as obvious as a pedophile opening up a child day care center.
Western performance is laughable at this stage... It's all entertainment, when we were children, we would watch cartoons, today, we can watch the US elite of government and corporate leaders and enjoy far more slap stick.
Posted by: Luther G. Quick | May 5, 2007 2:15 PM
Yo!
What do you think about Tokio Hotel? >:)
Posted by: CandyShopGirl | October 9, 2007 3:41 AM
think about if hitler wasant so crazy how it was. U.S. and U.R.S.S. will gone have a lot of work to do, togeter or no, who knows? The war have no winner, Hitler with his errors and obssessions lose the war and his sick dreams. What the mather who won, nobody could bring back the death.
Posted by: Maurício Barros | January 26, 2008 4:41 PM
"the fact that the blitzkrieg-ing Wehrmacht was still a mostly horse-drawn army with highly mobile mechanized units as spearheads"
Well, for about 6 months each year only horses were able to avoid getting stuck in the mud, and for other 3 months only horses managed to start up in the morning and get moving without waiting a few hours to have their "engines" heated with torches. This was a burden on both the German army (plus allies) and on the SU army.
WWII armies depended a lot more on railways than on horses or trucks. I think that from 1941 to 1943 SU had to reconfigure it's railway network, and up to 1943 the Germans used the railways in the captured SU territory as internal lines of communication, while SU had to improvise on "outer lines" and was not able to take back the initiative until it had it's communications fixed.
I think the "Italians got us boggled in the Balkans" is just an excuse, and the Barbarossa operation was planned to start at the end of June anyway: that's when the rainy season ends and the fields/roads get dry enough to support the advance of an army.
Might say that Germany lost the WWII during the WWI when they raped Ukraine and the Balkans (some US Red Cross reports talk about economy returning to barter -- sugar in Southern Rumania and cloth in Serbia and Montenegro becoming currency -- and the Germans "requisitioning" not only all the food that they were able to find, but also any scrap of metal, including cooking pots and plow blades): this might explain the Yugoslav coup that took the country out of alliance with the Germans, and why the Rumanians seemingly thought the Communists as the lesser evil: not only did they gave the minimum amount of troops that granted them some command autonomy, but also bled the Germans dry in exchange for food and fuel and kept enough troops at home to be able to make the switch when the Russians got close enough.
Posted by: Emil | June 23, 2008 6:54 AM
this is so crap
Posted by: Anonymous | August 27, 2008 4:18 AM