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The Soviets were already masters of extermination. Under Stalin they managed to murder at least 65 million of their own in the gulags prior to WWII. This is now well documented. One of the reasons they were so far behind the Germans tactically is Stalin murdered a huge number of very good general officers in his purge.
A friend, John P. was pretty much unbeatable at that game for years.
I've never played that one. When I was at DLI we played Third Reich and World in Flames every weekend. Ahh, those were the days. I played a lot of the Avalon Hill games, Panzerblitz, Panzer Leader, Squad Leader, Air Force/Dauntless, I still have many of them, but haven't played in years.
Stalin was a monster, one of the worst the world has seen. He was responsible for killing millions, but not for 65 millions, and especially not in gulags.
What is funny is the more time passes, the fewer people he murdered. The lowest reasonable estimate is 28.7 million from the Foundation for Economic Education. That number only refers to the gulags. It doesn't take in the 3.5 to 5 million who died of starvation after the destruction of the kulaks. It doesn't take into account those who died of disease and starvation. It's kind of like the nazi apologists who claim that only around 900,000 died in the concentration camps. That number ignores those who died of starvation and disease, which numbered in the millions.
The best studies are from the 1980's into the early 1990's when the CCCP collapsed and their records became available. One figure that is never even attempted to be calculated are the extra judicial killings that plagued the country for decades. Rough estimates for those are 1 to 1.5 million per year.
Never claimed otherwise. I probably should have focused on British jet design instead, though admittedly, it has been overshadowed by German jet design, and as such, I was too worried about how much the latter had influenced the former, if at all. Either way, the Japanese were lagging behind all major powers across the board, except perhaps Italy, who had largely been defeated as early as 1943, arguably. This would appear to have been, in part, a consequence of the maeuverability doctrine the Japanese were said to have followed during the war, which was the main point of the topic. Why this country and this doctrine, and whether or not any other nation could have followed similarly as well.
I am uncertain about the 12:1 kill ratio that the A6M supposedly achieved. Against whom? The ill-equipped and inexperienced Chinese air force? Besides that, it's lightweight aluminum had equivalents in America, and maybe elsewhere, if I remember correctly, and its large range involved numerous sacrifices. Not particularly innovative, so beyond that kill ratio, its hardly an uber weapon on the level of the bomb or the jet. Pilot training, the real reason for its success anyways, had some deficiencies, such as training in deflection shooting, among others, and is not a hard technology which would seemingly be more difficult to conceive, develop and produce in large quantities in the initial phases. The Japanese struggled to put out newer aircraft carriers, and older designs were still in service for much of the war, one of the reasons why newer, heavier carrier aircraft were late to be produced by the Empire. As for battleships, which is fairly unrelated to the conversation, the Japanese were said to have inferior projectiles, speed, range, radar, and, while armor could be thick enough to be impenetrable, was, in terms of technology, inferior in design. With the advent of missiles, submarine aircraft carriers, already irrelevant to the war for numerous reasons, including radar among others, would largely become a dead-end technology.
Improved, higher calibre, radar-guided AA would have made life difficult for the Ryusei. The Germans also had rocket-equipped aircraft, though the effectiveness of that type of aircraft, especially against heavily armored columns, has been disputed. Japanese rocket-equipped aircraft was slow to arrive.
My point is as follows. I have seen, in this discussion and elsewhere, that a worsening war situation, coming with increasing bombing raids crippling logistics, hindered the ability of the Japanese to reliably deploy or develop more sophisticated designs, yet, the Germans were putting out increasingly sophisticated designs, to a point yes, but still, they were advancing in technology even as the war turned bleak for them, as opposed to the Japanese. Is there not a disparity here? Japan a great power?
The destruction of the kulaks kind of argues against keeping local economies in place. The fact is the Soviets were interested in top down control to the point that factories were still producing items that were no longer being used.
