Posted on 03/12/2015 7:17:13 PM PDT by daniel1212
It was strategic, and also,
The Soviet advance and ultimate capture of the German capital was virtually unopposed by their allies. In an effort to avoid a diplomatic issue, United States Army General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower had ordered his forces into the south of Germany to cut off and wipe out other pieces of the Wehrmacht and to avoid the possibility that the Nazi government would attempt to hold out in a National Redoubt in the Alps. However, the failure of Operation Market Garden in late 1944 may have played a key role in this decision. .
The western Allies' decision to leave eastern Germany and the city of Berlin to the Red Army - honoring the agreement they made with the Soviet Union at Yalta - eventually had serious repercussions as the Cold War emerged and expanded in the post-war era - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_Berlin
Yet Western aid was substantial,
Soviet Weapons Losses in 1941 (The First Six Months Of The War)
72% of all Tanks.
34% of all Combat Aircraft.
56% of all Small-arms and Machine guns.
69% of all Anti-Tank guns.
59% of all Field guns and Mortars.
Take it from Zhukov:
"It is now said that the Allies never helped us . . . However, one cannot deny that the Americans gave us so much material, without which we could not have formed our reserves and could not have continued the war . . . we had no explosives and powder. There was none to equip rifle bullets. The Americans actually came to our assistance with powder and explosives. And how much sheet steel did they give us. We really could not have quickly put right our production of tanks if the Americans had not helped with steel. And today it seems as though we had all this ourselves in abundance." - http://www.historynet.com/russias-life-saver-lend-lease-aid-to-the-ussr-in-world-war-ii-book-review.htm
Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945. It has been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line.[29][30]
The United States gave to the Soviet Union from October 1, 1941 to May 31, 1945 the following: 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil), 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,900 steam locomotives, 66 Diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. One item typical of many was a tire plant that was lifted bodily from the Ford Company's River Rouge Plant and transferred to the USSR. The 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.[31] British deliveries to the USSR
In accordance with the Anglo-Soviet Military Supplies Agreement of 27 June 1942, military aid sent from Britain to the Soviet Union during the war was entirely free of charge.[32][33] In June 1941 within weeks of the German invasion of the USSR the first British aid convoy set off along the dangerous Arctic sea routes to Murmansk arriving in September. It was carrying 40 Hawker Hurricanes along with 550 mechanics and pilots of No. 151 Wing to provide immediate air defence of the port and train Soviet pilots. After escorting Soviet bombers and scoring 14 kills for one loss, and completing the training of pilots and mechanics, No 151 Wing left in November their mission complete.[34] The convoy was the first of many convoys to Murmansk and Archangelsk in what became known as the Arctic convoys, the returning ships carried the gold that the USSR was using to pay the US.
Between June 1941 and May 1945 3,000+ Hurricanes were delivered to the USSR along with 4,000+ other aircraft, 5,218 tanks, 5,000+ anti-tank guns, 4,020 ambulances and trucks, 323 machinery trucks, 2,560 bren carriers, 1,721 motorcycles, £1.15bn worth of aircraft engines and 15 million pairs of boots in total 4 million tonnes of war materials including food and medical supplies were delivered. The munitions totaled £308m (not including naval munitions supplied), the food and raw materials totaled £120m in 1946 index. Naval assets supplied included a battleship, 9 destroyers, 4 submarines, 5 mine sweepers, 9 trawler minesweepers, over 600 radar and sonar sets, 41 anti submarine batteries, several hundred naval guns and rocket batteries.
Significant numbers of British Churchill and Matilda tanks along with US M3 Lee were shipped to the USSR after becoming obsolete on the African Front. The Churchills, supplied by the arctic convoys, saw action in the siege of St Petersburg and the battle of Kursk.[35][36] while tanks shipped by the Persian route supplied the Caucasian Front. With the USSR giving priority to the defence of Moscow for domestically produced tanks this resulted in 40% of tanks in service on the Caucasian Front being Lend-Lease models.[37]
I see. Very informative! Meanwhile, the Japanese were bewildered by the Navajo code talkers.
Which itself was judged not warranting the resources needed to defend it in the light of other locations.
Nothing to listen to but NPR!
Cruel and unusual punishment
The nuke, prevented my father, who served with Patton’s Third Army, and was sent to retrain for the invasion of Japan, from having to go to the Pacific to invade Japan. As a result I am here to be a thorn in the flesh to everyone I meet.
Howard Zinn, poisoning minds, for decades. Yet, if we as families, had been strong, Alinsky, Zinn and Chomsky would never have gotten a hold of generations of - “Our young minds and souls.” Never. There is no loss to humanity, as great as the unrecognizable misshapen social contruct of today, in the US culture, on all levels.
Tech goes back a ways.
And he made in Jerusalem engines, invented by cunning men, to be on the towers and upon the bulwarks, to shoot arrows and great stones withal. And his name spread far abroad; for he was marvellously helped, till he was strong. (2 Chronicles 26:15)
***Fleet Admiral William Leahy.***
Question: How many American lives was he willing to sacrifice so the BOMB would NOT be used!
True. Like 9111. But that new fanged thing called radar might have been of some help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCR-270_radar#Use_of_SCR-270_radar_at_Pearl_Harbor
Unit s/n 012 was at Opana Point, Hawaii on the morning of the seventh of December 1941 manned by two privates, George Elliot and Joseph Lockard. That morning the set was supposed to be shut down, but the soldiers decided to get in additional training time in since the truck scheduled to take them to breakfast was late. At 7:02 they detected the Japanese aircraft approaching Oahu at a distance of 130 miles (210 km) and Lockard telephoned the information center at Fort Shafter and reported “Large number of planes coming in from the north, three points east”. The operator taking his report passed on the information repeating that the operator emphasized he had never seen anything like it, and it was “an awful big flight.”
The report was passed on to an inexperienced and incompletely trained officer, Kermit Tyler, who had arrived only a week earlier. He thought they had detected a flight of B-17s arriving that morning from the US. There were only six B-17s in the group, so this did not account for the large size of the plot. The officer had little grasp of the technology, the radar operators were unaware of the B-17 flight (nor its size), and the B-17’s had no IFF (Identification friend or foe) system, nor any alternative procedure for identifying distant friendlies as the British had developed during the Battle of Britain. The raid on Pearl Harbor started 55 minutes later, and signaled the United States’ formal entry into World War II a day later.
The radar operators also failed to communicate the northerly bearing of the inbound flight. The US fleet instead was fruitlessly searching to the southwest of Hawaii, believing the attack to have been launched from that direction. In retrospect this may have been fortuitous, since they would have met the same fate as the ships in Pearl Harbor had they attempted to engage the vastly superior Japanese carrier fleet, with enormous casualties.
After the Japanese attack, the RAF agreed to send Watson-Watt to the United States to advise the military on air defense technology. In particular Watson-Watt directed attention to the general lack of understanding at all levels of command of the capabilities of radar- with it often being regarded as a freak gadget “producing snap observations on targets which may or may not be aircraft.” General Gordon P. Saville, director of Air Defense at the Army Air Force headquarters referred to the Watson-Watt report as “a damning indictment of our whole warning service”.
That’s a line of argument that has its roots in the 1960s Left. I wish conservatives would cease using it but Hannity and Limbaugh keep making it popular. It will backfire on those who use it.
The Republican party has plenty in its own past that makes a mockery of the Bill of Rights. I doubt that 5% of this site has much of an idea of what Reconstruction entailed. The Civil Rights Acts were passed by FDR protege Lyndon Johnson with the assistance of the progressive northeastern GOP establishment and those acts were opposed by Barry Goldwater and other conservatives.
Conservatives of that time understood that giving the national government the power inherent in those bills would permit politicians to dictate what is acceptable opinion and criminalize what authorities dislike. You have to look no further than what is happening to those frat boys in Oklahoma. In another time they would have been regarded as boorish or rude at worst. Now they are nationally reviled thought criminals worthy of having their lives ruined. That is a predictable result of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Celebrate it if you want, I won’t.
Leahy believed that the blockade and firebombing was sufficient. That doesn’t mean he was correct but it does mean that he didn’t think it was a tradeoff in American lives.
When changing the future, one can't start too young. The Zinn Education Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to "Teaching A People's History" maintains a website of educational resources for getting Zinn's ideas into elementary and even preschool classrooms. A Young People's History of the United States is already available; next up is the comic-book version. The story always begins with friendly Indians paddling blithely into the clutches of European imperialists. http://www.conservapedia.com/Howard_Zinn
Cruel and unusual punishment in the light of the alternatives?
>This is one of those perennial issues that America-bashers constantly raise.<
.
Because none of them spent any time in a Japanese concentration camp.
Well there is this %-age Freeper who has family understanding of Reconstruction. That’s why true Southerners have an excellent understanding of the abuses of Statists and overbearing central federal govt, regardless of party.
“Every man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too late… It means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for derision… It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.”
Maj. General Patrick R. Cleburne, CSA, January 1864
It was not the War Generation, to which I referred. I was talking about the 5 generations that were taught nothing about their history of truly self-indulgent warmongering. Hitler convinced unworthy people, that they could viciously steal, murder unto genocide and commit every inhuman act, towards their fellow citizens. The youngers, you mention are not mainstream. But, if you say so- I do not believe your little/big story. The germanics and their heathens, are ill equipped, and not well rated.
My 94 yr old father was in the same situation. A 25 yr old officer in Patch’s 7th Army waiting to see when he would be shipped to the Pacific.
The 7th Army had previously had the honor of having George Patton as their commander and were quite happy to share him with the 3rd Army. Patch was easier to live with.
In later years in Vietnam my dad served with George Patton IV and found him an excellent officer who didn’t capitalize on his famous name.
If you own a Business and you don't want to serve anyone for any reason, that should be your Right as a Sovereign American Citizen.
If someone doesn't want my Business because I'm Italian, I go to the guy that loves his Italian Customers and the Money they bring him.
The Gun to your Head idea that the Civil Rights Act instituted is clearly Unconstitutional, but here we are, the PC States of America.
You and me and wardaddy for the same reason.
George Marshall was a Virginian, as was Patton’s family, and I’ve always suspected that in part the Marshall Plan was a result of his knowledge of the famine and decades of ruin inflicted on the southern people by the war.
I don’t think that most appreciate that in the view of Lincoln the people and lands he was waging war upon had never ceased being parts of the USA. These weren’t citizens of another country. Imaginations might be made to focus differently if our current Illinois President called up an army to use against some recalcitrant American states that opposed one of his progressive programs. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was passed to prevent the future militarily occupation of the states by the national government as was done during Reconstruction, not that that would stop him.
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