Old boy with a sense of humour

Just for the record Barbarosa failed for three primary reasons over and
above the Nazis poor strategy.

Timing. Attack was delayed for various reasons, British actions but also
disagreement within the Nazi hierarchy.

Poor intelligence. Most of the Nazis intelligence about the Soviet Union was
wrong and they had no idea of the industrial capacity that had been built up
far to the East

Numbers game. Only Blitzkrieg was going to work, and it could have done I'm
sure. A slower advance gave the Ruskies a chance to mobilise much greater
numbers, albeit poorly trained and denuded of command by the Purges. But it
also gave them a chance to ramp up their industrial output, sites far out of
reach of German bombers, with capacity to rival the USA. A slow war is one
of attrition and the Krauts were never going to win that game.

A prize **** up. The greatest military disaster of all time. No surprise,
great orator perhaps, some good organisers by his side certainly, but Hitler
was a chump. Hugely outclassed by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill.

 

Not really, no.

Yes.

 

Sure, but a substantial proportion of the original population
survived. I guess the later generations in the West learned Western
history and those in the East learned Eastern history....

 

Thank **** he didn't lead the country during the war.

 

Germany was split into four occupied zones after being defeated and
occupied after WW2: the Russian, British, US and French zones. The
creation of the East and West German states which you are referring to
did not occur until 1949.

 

You won't ever find me defending Des but your are being somewhat of a
pedant.

 

Live by the sword; die by the sword. Des's TwenCen history is shaky.

 

The thing is, the division into four parts made a practical
difference, when the three Western Allies were all trying to grab
rocket knowledge, for example. The Americans snuck out piles of
blueprints just before the border changed and the hidey hole would
have been under British control.

 

Indeed they did. Mind you, they were in the position of being able to do
something practical and useful with it, whereas we didn't have the
resources.

 

Cambridge uni would have given it to Stalin anyway

 

He didn't need it: within a couple of years, the Soviets were
designing their own, better, rockets.

 

Actually, they didn't. The Americans had von Braun firing V2s around
in the desert, while the Soviets were extracting as much information
as they could from the Germans, and designing rockets better for
themselves.

http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/their-russians-were-better-than-our-germans/

 

Yes, that was odd. The early Russian rockets were way better than the
American.

 

Heh. yes, I kind of got lost there. I'm sure they also learned from
their parents their own version of history, too.

 

Soviet engineers were certainly better at designing rockets. It has been
attributed to great technical people doing it the Fred Dibnah way. After
perestroika Nasa engineers were able to visit and were amazed at the
capability of the heavy lift boosters, which exceeded what the Yanks thought
was theoretically possible, but they hadn't been designed by physicists.

Nobody should put the Russsians down when it comes to engineering ability,
their war equipment before Barbarosa mostly exceeded the Nazis for
useability, performance and repairability and their mass production was as
good as the Yanks (who had assisted).

TBF they didn't seem to be quite as cutting edge in Physics. Or reactor
design. Or submarine design.

Rather sad how a great nation was ravaged then by Communism and now by
<shrug> I don't know quite what to call it.

 

This is probably a bite, but the great achievements in technology came
under Communism. Do you really mean that Tsarist Russia was a `great
nation'?

 

No, I was referring to the ability and (superhuman) resilience of the people
*despite* 3 broken forms of government (to date)

 

The Germans put the first man into space. And onto the moon. Neither
Russia nor the US would have got anywhere without them.

OK, let's take Russian kit, generally.

SST? The TU144 was a failure.

Aircraft carriers, argubaly the most sophisticated sort of vessel
afloat? Too complex: they just couldn't do it. A couple of Kiev-class
through-deck cruisers.

Airliners? Plenty of robust basic aircraft, but nothing that would
willingly be bought by any country outside the eastern bloc unless
amazing discounts were offered.

Cars & bikes? Enough said.

Military aircraft? See "airliners". Again - some decent stuff in the
early days, but even the MiG-15 used a copy of a British engine and was
shot down in huge numbers by the Sabre. I will admit to a soft spot for
the Bear.

Submarines? Plenty of clunkers and an accident record to envy. Not.

Nuclear reactors? Chernobyl.

Spacecraft? Yes, in the early days, but the Yanks overtook them and
effortlessly left them behind.

Tanks? Again, fine until the era of sophisticated AFVs. We all saw what
happened to Soviet-era tanks in the Gulf War.

Computers? Oh, yes, Microsoftski, that famous Russian giant.

Seriously, one acid test of someone's technology is whether someone,
lots of people, buy it or copy it, and right now I can't think of *any*
Russian tech that falls or fell into that category. Not since about
1960, anyway. There must be some, though. Anyone?

 

The Older Gentleman wrote:

Aww bless.

 

Well, sickles never took off, but I've seen hammers *everywhere*.