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Hi,
Does this thread get the #1 slot for drift?
I had thought of contributing, but I don't have a chatbot subscription.
Eng
No. I did join a game late that my friends were playing. They used every piece and board section from both Panzer Blitz and Panzer Leader. Rocco was the Axis. I took over for him and I was pushing the Wallies back into the sea and had the Soviets back to the gates of Moscow. Very realistic.
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.The Germans were coming in with a policy of extermination. With the largest and most modern army in the world at that time. The US has never faced such a threat. Just a little perspective.
A friend, John P. was pretty much unbeatable at that game for years.You ever play Panzergruppe Guderian? That's a very interesting game...
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.A friend, John P. was pretty much unbeatable at that game for 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.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.
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 Black Book of Communism write 20 million in soviet union ... so 65 is wrong
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.the article of FEE not report 28.7 millions deaths by stalin/communism in soviet union just 28.7 million go to the gulag and "out of which millions died as a result of the system of forced labor".
if actually Stalin killed 65m people in soviet union in around 30 years the germans will win in the eastern front because of lack of soldier in the red army
p.s. and the Black book is a 1997 book not a new
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 think while it is true that the Germans made some great kit in WW2, I think perhaps their greater accomplishment was propaganda about how great they were. It still resonates with a lot of people. The British and the Americans both also had jets, they didn't put as much priority into the production and development because they were not going for a 'hail Mary pass' the way the Germans were with their uber-weapons programme, and when it came to special projects, their emphasis was on other things with a bigger payoff. But I don't think they were lagging behind the Germans across the board.
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.The Japanese "Uber weapons" mainly came early - the A6M was certainly a world-class, fear inducing shock when it appeared. The type 93 torpedo (aka known in Anglophone circles as "Long Lance") turned out to be a devastatingly effective naval weapon, making even fairly average bombers into deadly ship killers. These two weapons alone contributed to the astonishing success the Japanese had in the early war in taking immense territorial prizes from the Western powers. The Japanese aircraft carriers were new and sophisticated technology, something that the Germans certainly never matched, and were definitely in the running for the best in the world. And let's not forget that they also created the worlds largest and most formidable battleships in the Yamato and Musashi. The fact that they didn't really impact the war that much can also be said for the German jets and rockets, or their giant battleships (which seem to get a lot better press). The Japanese also developed technology like submarine aircraft carriers.
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.I would say when it came to the most sophisticated weapons, including aircraft, the Japanese focused on naval designs. The B7A was probably the best dive bomber design of the war, an order of magnitude more sophisticated and effective than a Stuka.
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?When we do look at the German kit, we tend to focus a lot on their best successes. We look at the excellent Bf 109, which stayed competitive, albeit with major flaws, through the end of the war. Competitive but certainly not dominant after say, 1942, as the British and Americans kept up, and by later 1943, the Soviets as well. The superb Fw 190 had it's moment, for sure, but it was not exactly dominant by 1944. The Ju 87 was a deadly weapon in the early war, but obsolete by the middle. But the Bf 110, basically a failure at least as a day fighter, tends to be ignored by the "Germans are Uber" crowd. As does the Me 210, the He 177, Ju -188, the Do 217, and basically all their later war bombers and heavy fighters. V-1 and V-2 were sophisticated terror weapons, but you can't win a war through random terror strikes against civilians.
The Nazi state was built on a flawed, demented concept. This distorted everything they did. Maybe they would have done better if they hadn't wasted so many resources systematically murdering people in death camps. They did make slave labor work for a while, but mysterious failures in the quite impressive Panther tanks can be traced back to sabotage by those same slaves. It's not a war-winning strategy in the long run. And while yes they were sophisticated, and very advanced in certain fields like Jets and large rockets, they weren't the top or the best at everything, in fact they had some rather ghastly failures (Enigma maybe the biggest of all, aside from strategic blunders largely due to their political system). Their delusional doctrine of superiority lingers though, like a virus.
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.
You're ignoring his point, Gary. Aside from 3 million men followed up by Einssatzgruppen, the German ideology of extermination was external more than internal. The Soviets exterminated ideological opponents or Stalin's perceived internal threats; the Germans specifically aimed to exterminate Jews and Slavs behind the armies, with specialized units to do this -- along with killing ideological opponents.
It's a false equivocation to compare GULags to German occupation. They were very different.
I am not ignoring anything. And no, the German ideology managed to exterminate a minimum of 3 million of their own citizens. With my own eyes I have seen the multiple grave markers in the Lich Cathedral that over and over and over describe Germans killed by the GESTAPO.
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.Right, they killed their own Jews, and other "untermenschen". But the difference you're ignoring is that in the Drang Nach Ost, the Germans drove into Poland and the USSR precisely in order to get rid of the local populations so that Das Volk might have Leibensraum -- while on the other hand the Stalin purges were 1) not military operations and 2) nor based on a racial ideology except for the Holodomor, but rather aimed at perceived threats.
In short, you're right that both regimes were bloodthirsty and killed millions; but your analysis is oversimplistic because while the NaZi invasion aimed to kill or remove everyone (eventually), the Stalinesque archipelago was more designed to provide continual cheap labor for the state while leaving the local economy in place, while the German aim was to "cleanse" an area racially as well as ideologically for the eventual settlement by "Aryans".
So yes, you are indeed ignoring some facts.