There’s also Ireland.
The United States, as well as the UK, were quite obviously attacking on two fronts in the latter half of the war. They may have been retaking stolen territory but it was a theatrewide offensive.
For that matter the USA attacked on multiple fronts in the Civil War.
Attacking on two fronts is certainly quite a plausible strategy if you do it right. I would again point out that beating Russia is a doable thing, as evidenced by the fact that Germany did it just a little earlier in the 20th century.
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Just another myth… see: Spanish SS (“blueshirts” or something…)
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Some second-rate volunteer division obviously is not the same as a nation-state actually entering a war, which, obviously, is the sense I meant.
Blue Division. Camisazules, “blueshirts”, is the name given to Falange members, for the color of their shirts.
The article probably meant Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Ireland, ignoring the two micro-states.
If you’re going to call Swedish neutrality ‘iffy’ then Portugal has no place on that list; the Portuguese decision to allow the Allies basing rights and eventually outright leasing bases on the Azores was vital in closing the Mid-Atlantic Gap which was otherwise beyond the range of land based air cover for convoys in the Battle of the Atlantic.
You still try to underplay Spain’s help to the Fascist cause…
Or just being too lazy to do some reading?:rolleyes:
After the second world war, many people, and many countries that had collaborated with the Axis, in one way or another,
needed to be “bleached” away from their sins.
Because, now, there was a new war, a Cold War,
and all these elements would help in the fight against the “evil” Communism.
In this context, many propaganda myths were invented, including, of course, the “Spanish neutrality”.
What on earth could we be asked to read that would change the fact Spain’s contribution was a second rate batch of volunteers, not actually Spanish troops?
Nothing’s being “bleached” here. You’re reading things in to people’s posts that aren’t there.
You could start with the links Nava provided.
Perhaps you should. Nothing RickJay has said isn’t true.
RickJay said they were “second rate” yet the linked article shows they held up against superior forces to hold the Leningrad siege. They were also not solely volunteers as the linked article mentions that as casualties rose near the end of the war they started adding conscripts to the force. So yeah, it shows he’s not totally on the mark.
Yeah, I wouldn’t categorize them as second rate either, but “underplay[ing] Spain’s help to the Fascist cause” was clearly not his intent. They were organized as and assigned a number in the German infantry division sequence, the 250th, and from all I have read were considered the equal to a German division by the Wehrmacht itself.
Now this is interesting; I have never heard that conscripts were used. This is rather bizarre and at odds with everything I have read and has several equally odd statements around it - “Franco dispatched more reinforcements, which in time included conscripts in addition to volunteers. There is clear historical evidence that the Blue Division was guilty of war crimes because the seige of Leningrad led to the death of over 100,000 Russian civilians .” - How this is clear evidence of war crimes by the Blue Division is beyond me. It appears the site used as a reference is a defunct site paper. Roughly just short of 50,000 Spaniards served on the Eastern Front through rotation, but far from reinforcing the force Franco reduced the size of the force and eventually ordered its return altogether, although some refused to return. Following its losses at Krasny Bor outside of Leningrad the Spanish volunteer force was reorganized as the much smaller Blue Legion: