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The 1941 Project
The true history of WW2 begins in 1941, when the Nazis attacked the blameless and unsuspecting nation of the USSR – the English translation is FBNS, or “Flawed but Noble Socialists.”
No matter how much you squint, you will not find the United States on that pie chart.
It’s a remarkable tweet, no? The first thing that leaps out is the equation of “death” with “contribution to victory,” as if suffering the most casualties is how you beat an enemy. A Patton quote comes to mind.
Then there’s the Chinese flag.
Then there’s the implication that Germany was somehow 19% responsible for defeating fascism because they lost a lot of people as well.
She also retweeted the totally awesome Russian embassy commemorating the victory. Huh: I thought Russia was BAD? Silly Moose. Post-Communist Russia is bad. Soviet Russia was good, because they were so seriously opposed to fascism. Okay . . . so what about the occupation of the nations and peoples after the war?
(rapid blinking)
Russia saved the world from fascism.
Look, I have an admiration for the Russian people’s ability to endure centuries of blows to the head by stupid, mulish leaders, and still have the stones to fight back against invaders, but the USSR was led by an utter sociopath who would have fed 25 million more into the meat grinder if he meant he could live in heated rooms with soft cushions and smooth sheets and roast duckling whenever he wanted, so maybe we ought not to valorize the death count? Anyway. What about the enslavement of half of Europe after the war?
(rapid blinking)
You have to understand how Russia was scarred by the loss of so many, and alarmed by the aggressive posture of the West.
Yes, our aggressive, reckless, provocative policy of building democratic institutions that were not predicated on Marxist-Leninist theories of collectivism that somehow always turned out to be oligarchical, atheistic, and repressive. What of Czechoslovakia in ’68, Poland in the early ’80s?
(rapid blinking)
An empty credential.
The US contribution to the Soviet war effort was decisive. The US sent ~ 500K 4×4 vehicles ( the USA made the best ones in the world) which gave the Russians a critical mobility edge over the Nazis- who used hundreds of thousands of HORSES to draw artillery around. The USA gave Russian more motor vehicles than Russia made during the war- this allowed Russia to concentrate on armored vehicle production. The US & UK provided >20K armored vehicles (Germany only made ~50K itself). The US provided ALL of the Soviet air forces high octane fuel as well as most of their Telegraph/telephone wire and thousands of locomotives. The US sent >10K aircraft. The Allied bombing effort forced the Nazis to keep ~15,000 heavy flak guns in Germany- these would have made excellent tank killers on the Eastern front- most of them were the feared 88mm- many thousands of Russian tanks would have been destroyed if they were freed up to use in the East. The US fed a large portion of the Red Army. Stalin so wished to disguise the US’ contribution that people were told that the USA on the sides of all those crates was an acronym for “kill that son of a bitch Adolf” ( in Russian it would be USA).
So America made tons and tons of technologically sophisticated goods (literally tons of material) and shipped it across the Ocean while the Communists sent waves of men to die. Makes you think.
For a while we shipped it to the bottom of the ocean.
Capitalism is never perfect because it emerges from humanity but it represents mankind’s versatility.
Specialization is often the key to success-do what you are good at. Communists are good at killing people & capitalism is good at production & innovation. I read some where a comparison of the productivity of workers for each of the major combatant nations- the productivity of America was unrivaled. Having sound management, targeted investment & research and plain hard working men & women is a tough combination to match.
I’m finding the excellent article and the comments enlightening. Some things should be obvious, but I suppose you have to be old like me to have been part of that history or, on the other hand, educationally abused.
It’s always a judgement call: were those casualties or traitors?
Maybe it depends on which direction they were facing when they died?
The higher ups in the USSR would never be so fair. They were traitors or heroes depending on how they felt that day. Remember that the USSR was the inspiration for 1984.
She is a communist who’s a big part of communist Glen Ford’s Black Agenda Report. Worth reading just to know. I “discovered” this about ten years ago listening to Mark Thompson on the Sirius “progressive” channel.
I remain convinced that people should tweet less.
Unless, of course, their goal is a public revelation of their shocking idiocy. Then tweet away, tweetasaurus.
Man. No graph included of the mass rapes committed by the Russian army on its drive westward. I guess that must be the wrong type of socialism or something. But they defeated fascism! By sacrificing millions idiotically in an untrained and under-supplied and idiotically-led army, one who had most of its competent leaders killed by same Soviet Hero Stalin ™ in the 1930’s, because Communism.
Schools really need an enema.
They should be starved. Enemas can get rid of a bad condition in an otherwise healthy body. Schools are far too corrupt for that.
I was really thinking about the U-boats and the Murmansk convoys.
And THIS is why I love this site. I post this thing before bed, come back, and it’s a fascinating thread. Thanks!
Indeed. The German U-boats were very effective – for awhile anyway. But human innovation eventually figured a way around it like black markets figure a way around regulators.
Thanks for all the reading recommendations, Ricochetti. I know I can count on you guys to be a well-educated bunch.
Margaret should also be sending a strongly worded letter, but to Williams. She deserves that money back.
No, Williams did what it is well known to do- provide a left wing slanted education. FIRE has named Williams as one of the ten worst colleges for free speech (which is a polite way to say anti-conservative speech). It is one of the colleges I would refuse to pay my children’s tuition to- like Amherst, Evergreen, Oberlin etc.
There were 3 routes sea-based and 1 air-based routes Lend-Lease took. One was the northern route to Murmansk and Archangel. Initially, Stalin insisted this be the only route. Also, the Americans had to enlarge the ports because they were too small to handle the load and to avoid long turnaround times.
The Americans also began insisting on a southern route through Iran. That route was longer but safer. The southern part of Iran was under British control and the northern part under Soviet control. That route was opened up and was closer to the southern part of the battlefront than Murmansk. That route also required not only building new harbors but new roads and railroads through Iran and the Caucuses.
Then there was Vladivostok. The Americans turned over 50-100 ships to fly the Soviet flag. ?The Japanese allowed them to sail through.
There was also an air route where American pilots would ferry planes to Fairbanks, Soviet pilots would pick up the planes in Fairbanks and fly them to where they were needed. The planes were loaded with usually high-valued goods as well. Stalin would not allow the Americans to fly the planes to the Soviet Union.
PQ-17 Stands out in that regard although I believe it was mostly German aircraft from Norway that did that convoy in and the British belief that the Tripitz had sortied, At least I think I am remembering that correctly.
Believe it or not, my wife and I attended a Mark Steyn talk held at Oberlin College in the early 2000’s. There is actually a conservative professor there who gave the introduction by wisecracking something like “We welcome you all to this bastion of conservative thought, Oberlin College” followed by laughter. There were no protestors or hecklers and everybody had a helluva good time.
Well, many times “human innovation” amounts to “quit being stupid”. In the case of the early successes of the U-boats, outbound merchant ships were perfectly silhouetted against the bright lights of the cities they were departing from. U-boat captains were amazed at the stupidity of Americans and merchant seamen paid for this stupidity with their lives.
Uh, how many instances of similiar stupidity are we seeing today?
I didn’t say that humans adapted quickly.
VDH wrote about this in one of his books on WWII (I think the 2 world wars) – Part of this was Stalin’s doing –
he had the purges in the 1930s where a lot of his top brass in the military was decimated.
Part of this was because the USSR was not able to ramp up it’s economy to outfit the military
The real fun time, is when Stalin briefly allowed American bombers to be based in Ukraine. He quickly decided it was a terrible mistake.
There’s recent scholarship with access to Soviet archives that show that the percentage of Soviet officer corps purged was much lower than initially thought. The Soviet officer corps still didn’t perform very well initially, but it was as much because those purged were replaced by party hacks with no real experience.
The Soviets were able to produce plenty before the war. They had vastly superior quantities (6:1 to 10:1 advantage) of planes, tanks, guns sitting on the front when Hitler smashed through. They didn’t have the command-and-control systems or quality of generalship the Germans did at the front. As a result, the Germans captured or destroyed what was there.
The Germans usually captured the factories where the Russians were producing the armaments before the Soviets could disassemble them and ship them east of the Urals. There were factories shipped, but it was relatively few. They had to build them anew. And did.
At Poltava, they weren’t based there but allowed to land and refuel. Stalin promised this at the Teheran Conference in late November 1943. The British and Americans were trying to supply the Polish and needed to land. Stalin of course wanted Poland for himself, so at first, wouldn’t allow them to land. Once Russians thought they had control in September 1944, they would let them land and refuel.
The problem for the Soviet officer corps was that political reliability trumped military skill. Marshal Budenny, a senior Soviet officer, was known as “a man with a very large mustache and a very small brain”. But Stalin knew he could be trusted to follow the party line. No officer would show intiative b/c it could lead to being shot. There are great stories of German intercepts of Russian radio communications where the central command would order an immediate attack and the responding officer would reply “listen you SOB there is only me and the radio man left!”