A bit belated, but BrainGlutton, SIL=sister-in-law.
In my opinion the Germans lost the war by no later then about October 1941 with their failure to defeat the soviet union, and this failure was overwhelmingly due to the character of the soviet regime. From that point on the war was lost to the Germans whatever else happened, and was lost regardless of whether the US entered the war or remained neutral.
I doubt any other regime other then the soviet one could have survived the magnitude of the german onslaught in 1941, and the massive scale of the losses in manpower, territory and resources that it entailed. Imperial Russia from the first war was poorly organised, backwards, inefficient at mobilising its resources and totally incapable of developing and maintaining the industrial effort that total war required. In the first war it was not unknown by 1915-1916 for many russian soldiers to go into battle unarmed with instructions to pick up weapons off dead soldiers. Such a nation had no prospect of surviving 1941. Despite Hollywood’s occasional refusal to let a good story die (see Enemy at the Gates for instance which transplanted the WW1 ‘no guns’ reality to WW2 fiction), Stalin’s forced industrialisation of the USSR had totally transformed the picture. In the event the USSR outproduced Germany and it did this in the face of the over-running of much of it’s industrial base and resources, the forced and urgent need to relocate industrial plants to the east, and despite having been reduced to a smaller resource base after much of its known resources were captured. An excellent book dealing with this topic is Richard Overy’s “Why the Allies won”.
It would be hard to overestate the importance of this to allied chances in WW2, it was so absolutely critical. If the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1941, the prospect of a successful allied return to the continent become essentially zero. Yes, there would have been partisan warfare in the east, but large scale partisan warfare doesnt chew up men and material at anything like the constant daily attrition of large scale conventional warfare. Even after leaving large garrisons in Russia, Germany would still have been free to transfer circa two million men and their equipment back to the west, and the constant strain on German industry to replace the losses of equipment in the east would have been greatly eased. German armament priorities would be switched to greater emphasis on air and naval weapons and less on replacing losses in the unrelenting attrition from the eastern bloodbath.
None of this means the western allies would lose the war, as the Germans would still have their fundamental problem of being unable to invade Britain. But they couldn’t win it either, and a compromise peace would be likely.
Well I disagree, my sources are a number of books I’ve read on the subject, including the history of the Manhattan Project and ‘E=MC squared’. The Wikipedia cite also states “Their conversations were recorded as Allied analysts attempted to discover the extent of German knowledge about nuclear weapons. The results were inconclusive,…”
Is this a whoosh? I was under the impression that the Third Reich was years behind the US in terms of nuclear weapons development, partially due to the sabotage of the heavy water facilities in norway.
And even if they did get the bomb, they didn’t have an effective delivery system other then put on a truck or a ship and hope the allies don’t notice it until it’s too late, or maybe just lure the allies into an area and set the bomb off.
Sure, there were plenty of good things in my experience (in Moscow and Kharkov) as far as public goods went. Excellent basic medical care, great local libraries, top-notch subways, trams, and trolleys, schools of much, much higher quality than anything I’ve seen in LA. Both cities had large (and oddly enough, clean) parks. Nice little resorts in the countryside, though the ones near Kharkov held a small risk of live arty shells or mines from WWII hidden along the forest paths.
Oh, and there were no Scientologists or televangelists around till the Union collapsed. 
Didn’t the United States help the USSR during WWII by sending food and other supplies?
Marc
Dare I ask, what history of the Manhattan Project? And do you mean David Bodanis’s E= mc[sup]2[/sup]. If so, it’s hardly a significant book on the subject.
I surveyed the historiography of German wartime nuclear research at some length (though not exhaustively) in this old thread; the books by Mark Walker or David Cassidy would be a good place to start. (I should possibly add that I haven’t yet been able to see Rainer Karlsch’s recent evidence in any detail yet and I’ll remain dubious until at least then.)
You’re misunderstanding the context. The British and US authorities were most definitely interested in understanding how far the Germans scientists had got when they interned them at Farm Hall, but they were also certain by then - and had been for months - that the German projects had been years behind their own progress.
The fall of Nazi Germany allowed the US to grab a lot of German rocket scientists, but the physicists had already left Germany and Italy in the 30s.
Yes, and on an enormous scale. The armaments provided came to only about 10% of the russian’s own production, but other aid supplied especially aviation fuel and motor transport came to make up a very large proportion of the soviet supply of these items. It allowed them to concentrate their productive effort on armaments, and US trucks (over 200,000 heavy trucks alone were supplied) made the red army more mobile then it would otherwise have been and were important to the success of soviet offensives in the latter part of the war.
However the vast bulk of this aid arrived from 1943 onwards after the Red Army had already broken the back of the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad and Kursk and the outcome was not in doubt. The amount of western aid received in the crisis months of 1941 was insignificant, and the soviet union survived on it’s own resources. Without western aid the russians would have taken longer to defeat Germany but the eventual outcome was going to be the same.
The US was meddling in Latin America long, long before the Cold War. It’d be tough to pin US imperialist ambitions re: the Philippines on the Commies, too.
Having fought the Eastern Front over and over again, both as Germans and as Russians (Avalon Hills “Russian Front”), I can assure you that a Soviet win is not guaranteed in the Winter of 41. In fact, if Hitler had not been shifting his goals every week, and if the supplies and material had been able to keep up with the front (and not held behind… despite the proof, some of the general staff could not get the idea of Blitzkrieg) I have firmly held to my belief that a capture of Moscow, or incirclement of same, would have probably removed the USSR from WWII.
All major rail lines ran through Moscow.
All communications lines ran through Moscow.
Also, as I should probably address the OP, I have to admit that the Soviets brought literacy to the masses, something that had not happend during the Tsarist regime.
Education was a major improvement in the USSR
http://www.photius.com/countries/soviet_union_former/society/soviet_union_former_society_higher_education.html
In 1987 the Soviet Union had 896 institutions of higher learning (vysshie uchebnye zavedeniia–VUZy), of which only 69 were universities. The remainder included more than 400 pedagogical, medical, and social science institutes and art academies and conservatories of music; over 360 institutes of specialized engineering and natural sciences; and about 60 polytechnical institutes. VUZy were located in major cities, including the union republic and autonomous republic capitals, with the highest concentrations in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. Enrollment was over 5 million students, with nearly 50 percent (2.4 million) attending part time.
Enrollment was over 5 million students, with nearly 50 percent (2.4 million) attending part time.
This was a huge change over the days of agricultural society that Russia used to live in. And the competitiveness of the cold war probably forced the Soviets to realize that a nation can’t survive internationally without an educated populace to build weapons, the economy and the infrastructure.
The problem is there is no telling what it would’ve been like with a normal revolution and not a soviet revolution. Maybe Russia would still be largely illiterate and uneducated like they were under the Tzar but I doubt that.
The starvation in the Ukraine was punishment for rebellion on the part of the Ukranians, not due to a lack of food. The USSR was exporting millions of tons of food when Ukranians were starving to death.
It is hard to say what Russia would be like now. Had the Mensheviks taken over Russia instead of the Bolsheviks i’m sure things would’ve been much better but there is no telling.
If the October Revolution had never happened, the dominant party in Russia probably would have been neither the Menshevik nor Bolshevik wing of the Social Democrats, but the Social Revolutionaries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Revolutionaries), who dominated the Kerensky government and won 40% of the vote in the election for the Constituent Assembly (which the Bolsheviks disbanded at gunpoint). The SRs were socialists, but they wanted the land “socialized,” i.e., distributed in smallholdings to the peasants, not nationalized by the state.
…and the reason was its vast economic inefficiency. Think about it…a country with half of the world’s oil, uranium deposits, raw materials in abundance, and huge farming areas, was (by the 1970’s) upon the brink of collapse! The whole economic premise of communism was tried and found faulty.
Actually, the USSR almost met its end several times:
In 1931 (the Ukrainian Revolt): The Ukrainian farmers decided to stop working: Stalin had most of them shot. A massive famine ensued. The USSR was saved by massive food aid from the USA (Herbert Hoover organized this).
-In 1941: The German Invasion almost finished them off…but Western Aid (from the UK (tank engines, airplanes, and food), and the USA (trucks and jeeps, plus food) kep th USSR alive.
-In the early 1960’s: Kruschev was forced to sell massive amounts of gold to buy food from Europe (the failure of the collective farms led to near-famine)
-In the mid-70’s: the rise in oil prices enabled the USSR to import food and technology;otherwise, revolts in Belorussia and Ukraine would have put an end to the USSR.
So the “evil empire” was actually on he verge of collapse several times. The wonder is that it lasted as long as it did.
Nevertheless, it did last that long, which is something to think about. See post #29.
And the North Korean dictatorship has lasted nearly as long. The only lesson to be learned from the longevity of a totalitarian state is that you can hold power for a long time if you’re willing to shoot enough people in the back of the head to achieve ‘stability’.
Throughout the 50’s and 60’s, computer scientists in the Soviet Union were responsible for the bulk of the important results in theoretical computer science research. The reason for this is quite simple: the bureaucracy was so massively ineffecient that Soviet computer scientists almost never got a chance to work with an actual computer, hence they had to work on theoretical results instead. As a result, they invented self-balancing trees and all sorts of other cool stuff.
Along with the USSR, the USA has essentially kept N. Korea and Cuba alive…under Clinton, we gave the N. Koreans food and oil (in return for the “promise” to stop enriching uranium). The USA prevented the collapse of the Castro regime in Cuba (twice): by allowing cash remittances from relatives in the US (which Castro appropriated), and second under Carter, when the USA alloed 200,000 Cuban criminals to emigrate to the US, in the “mariel” boatlift).
The thng we should NOT do: give anything to support such regimes. The faster Castro collapses, the better. Likewise for N. Korea.
Let me get this straight, Ralph, you think the United States is propping up the Castro and Kim regimes with financial support? Where do you get these ideas?