--- Chris Doss <itschris13 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >You pick on my missing
> >the date of Z's appointment to the General Staff,
> but
> >you miss the key thing, which include Stalin's
> >decimation of the Red Army,
>
> According to this, Stalin admitted to this being an
> error and tried to
> correct it:
>
http://casnov1.cas.muohio.edu/havighurstcenter/papers/Thurston.pdf
Oops! I killed 25,000 officers and murdered the leading military strategists of the century. An error to be sure . . .
--- Peter Lavelle <untimely_thoughts at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I too am not a military historian, however I share
> Medvedev's assessment. During the hardest part of
> the war (before the US entered the war), the Red
> Army had no choice but be self-sufficient.
> >do you think that the Russians
> >>would have been able to defeat Hitler without
> American
> >>supplies and material?
> >
> >---
> >I have no idea. I'm not a military historian.
> >Roy Medvedev is of the opinion that the US part in
> the war was
> >inconsequential.
> >
>
> This is Medvedev's opinion. I've posted a longer
> version of this before, but
> anyway... BTW Ekho Moskvy is a liberal radio station
> appealing to the
> intelligentsia.
I have a lot of respect for Roi Medvedev on lots of grounds, but this is silly. True, the Red Army hung on (just barely) in the crucual early days of the war. True, the war would not have been won had it not done so. But it would not have been won as the war went on without American trucks and American grain and American machine tools, etc. and without the terrible sacrifice of the American Merchant Marine, which brought those things across the Atlantic and the Arctic ocean against the U-Boats. look up the figures in Erickson or Clarke or Werth on how much of the Soviet military and economy depended on Lend-Lease in 42-44. I
Russians may now see the rest of the Allied contribution as negligible, but Stalin was right. That contribution was crucial and not a mere supporting role either. The war would have been lost had Churchill failed in the Battle of Britain, or had the codebreakers failed to break the Enigma code that enabled the winning of the Atlantic battle, thus permitting Britain to hang on, and thus North Africa to be recaptured and Normandy ultimately enabled. Does Roi M really think that the Red ARmy would have been able to win against the Wehrmacht in a one-front war if the Germans had controlled Middle Eastern oil and the Med? Rubbish. We would ultimately have got the bomb, but then how would we have delivered it without England as an aircraft carrier?
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